SATA 3 VS SATA 2 is it a huge difference on games?

[deadeye22]

Hi i own a 640GB WD caviar black sata 2 hard drive.... Im buying a new rig but im not changin my HD 5850 and my hard drive.... My question is. Is my hard drive going to keep my games from performing well, i mean i saw a guy with a worse cpu than me i got the 3570K the same card the same ram but a sata 3 hdd. He plays gta iv everything maxed out except the distance on 1920x1080 and got average 60FPS. Im i going to get less because of my HD?

 

[Deleted member 217926]

SATA 3 is meaningless to mechanical hard drives. Even 10,000RPM Velociraptors can not move enough data to saturate SATA 2 (3Gb/s ) completely much less SATA 3 ( 6Gb/s ). The faster SATA 3 is used by SSDs only.

Since it's cheaper to make a commom interface for everything newer hard drives have a SATA 3 interface. Meaning the link is capable of moving the information even though the drive is not. This is just marketing hype that makes all the people who don't know better think they are getting something they are not.

Even if the hard drive was slow the only way it would affect game performance would be in level load times. A slow hard drive would not make you get fewer FPS or anything.

 

[locomoco321]

@anort3 +1

 

[deadeye22]

oh so the only noticable difference is screen loading in games.... Besides that is my HD respectable i mean caviar black does have some reputation although 640GB is not enough so im gonna use an external for storage

 

[Deleted member 217926]

The WD 640 Black is a fine drive. I have 2 of them for storage in my computer now.

You will see no difference in speed in real world use between any newer 7200RPM hard drives. If you want faster you will need an SSD.