Bottleneck storage hard drive?

[Tary Moon]

hey guys,

I am currently building a gaming rig. i7 950, 6gb corsair dominator, asus p6x58d-e, asus gtx 470, cooler master silent pro m 850 watt power supply, cooler master haf 932 case, wd caviar sata 6gb/s 640 gb drive.

i have a 1tb wd caviar green hard drive lying around and i was going to put that into the case just for storage. i won't be installing any games/apps or anything on it. every program will be running off the caviar black.

my question is; will this lower-spec hard drive create any kind of bottleneck on performance?

i'll only be using it to store music and some videos on.

thanks for your help.

 

[wielander]

Short answer, absolutely not.


The caviar greens perform pretty well. Transfers to and from the drive may be a little slower than a higher speed drive, but you shouldn't have any trouble playing videos (even high bandwidth 1080p).

 

[wielander]

6 Gb/s SATA support makes absolutely no difference on a standard hard drive; the drives aren't capable of speeds high enough to saturate 3 Gb/s SATA II.

 

[Trashit]

Pretty much what has been said already, no it will not bottleneck. I have two 1TB Green drives for storage and its fine. In fact since im running Win7 it powers down the drives while not in use anyways. Before i got my SSD i was using one of the Green drives for my OS, that was a very bad idea and caused my system to hang constantly and took ages to boot. But i can safely say now that i have my SSD my system runs faster than it has ever done so before, boots in seconds, never lags or hangs, definitely no bottlenecks. Only thing you will find is that since Win7 powers down the drives, when you do go to access the drive it will hang for a few seconds while it spins up, but this goes for any mechanical HDD and im sure you can change this somewhere in the Win7 power management settings.

 

[pjmelect]

No.

 

[elbert]

The difference between the 2 drives with large files is negligible at best. You wouldn't notice much difference. Putting all the files on the caviar black could cause performance hits. HD's perform better with data near the outer edge of platters.

If your want the system to perform better I suggest a change your CPU and GPU for gaming. I would get the lower cost i7 930 and OC well past the 950's clock. Both these CPU's have about the same top OC. Use the Extra money for 2X 460GTXs with 1GBs in SLI. Here are some nice combo deal if you have yet to make your purchase.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.495222

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121391

 

[Tary Moon]

Wow, thanks for all the prompt replies! It definitely gives me a lot to think about. I was initially going to go with 2 x 460s but the price of the 470 here in the UK is nearly that of the 460. I guess I'm looking ahead to next year when Doom 4 and Rage are out. I wonder if 2 x 460s will be able to handle those games. I think 2 x 470s will stand a better chance. I'll only be picking up 1 470 for now though. I would love to get an ssd too, but they just don't come with enough space and are too expensive for my budget.

As for getting the i7 930 instead of the 950, there's very little difference in the price where i live. one is 229, the other is 219.

Much appreciated.

 

[t00_h0t]

The drive wont create a bottle neck for storage... It will only create a bottle neck if your system, or programs are running off the storage drive.
I have the 470, and i have the 6Gb/s Cav. Black 640GB 7200RPM drive

"6 Gb/s SATA support makes absolutely no difference"

Wrong! It has a 64mb cache instead of a 32mb... Switching to a 6GB/s drive made windows load twice as fast.

The 470 is great!

My Specs:
Core i7 870 2.93(OC to 4GHz at 40C[Temp])
COOLER MASTER Hyper 212
MSI P55A-GD65 LGA 1156 Intel P55 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard
Western Digital Caviar Black 640GB 7200 RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s
EVGA GeForce GTX 470 (Fermi) 1280MB 320-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16
SILVERSTONE OP800 800W ATX 12V 2.2 & EPS12V
A-DATA Gaming Series 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600
LG DVD Burner
Asus VE228H 21.5" Full HD HDMI LED BackLight LCD Monitor w/Speakers