What affects the loading speed of windows and games?

[samraptor]

in a harddrive what affects the loading speed of windows and games?

is it the rpm, internal data transfer rate, external data transfer rate, seek time, buffer size.....? amount of storage?

also would getting a faster hard drive in the chosen field from the list up there ^^ increase fps in games or would the fps in a game from hard drive x costing $1 be the same as from hard drive y costing $100

 

[chugot9218]

Hard drive makes no difference in FPS, RPM is quite important and is probably the most relevant, most drives come in either 5400, 7200, or more expensive and less common, 10000rpm. The other stats are more "nit-picking", there are not going to be monumental differences between mechanical hard drives on the other stats.

 

[ram1009]

the answer to your first question is "yes". However FPS is not affected by drive performanse.

 

[aramisathei]

Hard drives affect how quickly a game loads/boots/saves.
For best results, use a solid state drive if available, otherwise higher rpm hard disk drives produce faster performance (generally speaking).

Frames per second are determined primarily by the gpu, and secondarily by the cpu depending on the game (games such as Skyrim are focus heavily on the cpu).

If you want to increase your fps, you'll need to decrease your resolution/graphics settings, or overclock/upgrade your gpu and/or cpu.

 

[geotek]

You guys are forgetting that CPU also plays a large role in loading times for games. I dont have exact numbers but in the times before SSDs in certain games where everyone would load at the same time the load times directly matched CPU speeds.

 

[Wisecracker]

Don't forget the memory on the discreet card - size and type, and the bus width of the card.

 

[chugot9218]

That may have been at a time where there were CPU's that could not keep up with the saturation rate of the HDD's. I think most modern CPU's are able to handle the maximum data rates of most if not all HDD's, at least at sata2.

 

[wanderer11]

If I use a frame rate limiter my load times take longer in Skyrim. There is more to load times than just the hard drive.

 

[chugot9218]

Yes, there is, if your CPU is running enough other stuff that it is running at high usage, then it is going to take longer for the CPU to fetch all the data. But, on a modern CPU at low usage, it is not going to be saturated by the HDD. Your load times raise because your CPU is running another program and cannot dedicate all it's resources to fetching the information off the HDD to RAM.