Hard drive for gaming

[mistakwa]

Im looking for hard drive over 500gb for gaming usage and movie watching. does cache memory matter for those uses? also how does the rpm of the drive affect it? and what hard drive should i get for the price range of $50-$100? please leave a link and a prefer to order form newegg.

thanks.

 

[Emerald]

does cache memory matter for those uses? also how does the rpm of the drive affect it?

Yes


do to the flooding in some of the Asian countries which resulted in shortage of parts the prices for hard drives have increased by 50 to 100%.

I would prefer the WD; however, it is outside you price range

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136795

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152305

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148701

 

[nukemaster]

Im looking for hard drive over 500gb for gaming usage and movie watching. does cache memory matter for those uses? also how does the rpm of the drive affect it? and what hard drive should i get for the price range of $50-$100? please leave a link and a prefer to order form newegg.

thanks.

Cache memory does not have a huge effect outside benchmarks. It does give the drive an ability to spit out a very small segment of data fast(that has to fit into the cache). Most games loads are far larger then the cache so it will still come down to the speed of the drive it self.

Faster RPM drives tend to have lower access times. Access times are how fast the drive can get to the next read/write location on random reads. A de-fragmented drive can reduce the number of random reads but never eliminate it. So 7200 rpm is a good place to be. I have seen lower rpm drives with higher transfer rates(The higher the recording density the faster the read/writes are), but they are slow when they need to jump for data on different locations on the drive.

I personally use Western Digital(Black, only down side the 2TB one runs very hot) in my gaming systems as well, but Seagate drives are not slow and some are very quiet.

I use Seagate LP(5600 rpm and runs very cool) drives for my files since files do not generally require fast access times and are almost always sequential and not random read/writes.

Once a game is loaded into memory, the hard drive is no longer a factor, but getting it there a 7200rpm drive is best. And many MMO games load on the fly so fast access times are even more important

I hope this helps.