Need a new hard drive for gaming

[rsteve06]

Hello,

I need a new hard drive for gaming. Right now I have one a WD Raptor 74GB 10000 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 1.5Gb/s and it's just too small:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136033

I don't mind long loading times. I'm just not sure how much a hard drive can affect the actual performance of a game versus simply the loading time.

Any thoughts help me as I'm new to building my own. Thank you all!

 

[k1114]

Hdds only affect loading time. You should probably go with a samsung spinpoint f3 or a similar priced wd.

 

[geofelt]

The raptor is/was very good for the os because the 10k rpm gave it fast random access times for small random reads and writes. A task that the OS does a lot.

Today, the larger denser 1tb drives work well. Particularly with sequential I/O. The higher density makes for faster data transfer rates. Get one, even if you don't need the space.

If you have the funds, consider a SSD. It will transform the OS part of the equation, and sequential traqnsfsr is 3x the fastest hard drives. Random access is 50x.
Expect to pay $2 per gb.

You might get a 60-80gb ssd, for the os and your current game, and use the raptor for overflow.

 

[rsteve06]

Awesome - thanks!

 

[zackb-m]

either get another raptor with way more memory, all though they are quite expensive or settle for something in teh 7200rpm range which would be like a seagate barracuda, they cost arnd 70 bucks for a terra byte which is a lot of memory, or like 50 bucks for 500 gb