Slave HDD speed

[donsangha]

Hello, currently I am running a ocz vertex ssd as my master drive and a bog standard 1tb 5400 rpm as my backup drive. Would you mind telling me if I would notice a difference if I swapped my slave drive for a seagate barracuda 7200rpm drive and if so how much of a difference I would see. I install all of my files and video games on this drive.
Also, as I haven't compared this myself, can my ssd only load up a game off of my slave drive as quick as the 5400 drive could when put as a master drive.
THANKS

 

[price_th]

Access times are a function of spindle speed vs disk density. To answer your question you need to look at the HDD access times for read and write operations. Generally 7200 rpm drive are marginally faster. When you say Master drive if this is a SSD for disk cacheing the software caches commonly used files so it is only the inital load that takes more time.

 

[donsangha]

My ssd is what I am booting off. So you are saying that overall it does not really matter what my slave drive is as loading times off the slave will not differ much. As in like a second to access a game or movie difference. Will not be writing to the drive

 

[Hawkeye22]

Any programs/games you want to load faster should be on the SSD. Programs that you use less often or don't require faster load times should be on a hard drive along with your data (pictures, documents,...).

 

[price_th]

Quite offten you will find that RAM will improve performance. This is because when RAM fills up the page file on your drive swaps data from RAM. The drive being your modern PC's biggest bottle neck will cause these delays. SSD's help this with quicker loads and quicker page file swaps. If your inital load delay is not an issue, having more RAM removes the need for page file swapping. Hence once everything is loaded in RAM, system preformance is a none issue so long as you don't max out your RAM.

 

[donsangha]

So if you had a ocz vertex 4 with 16gb gskill ripjaw ram 1600 mhz but had a rubbish slave drive would you sell it and pay an extra 40GBP for a seagate barracuda 7200rpm for slave or is the difference going to be negligeable, sorry a bit dense? Also, will taking up about 80% of my ssd's storage space max slow it down and if so how should i prevent this?
Have an intel 3570k if that helps