Upgrading with a SATA w/ PATA already installed...

[hobbitshd]

I am looking into upgrading my hard drive for gaming. Will I benefit from a SATA Raptor(or any SATA model) to just put my game files on or am I better off putting the OS on the SATA drive? Should I just spend the money on a better video card? What will boost the performance most? My gaming budget is for only one of these 2 options, or other options within this spending range.
Thanks in advance for the help .

<font color=green>AMD Athlon64 3000 Winchester</font color=green>
<font color=red>MSI K8N Neo4 </font color=red>
<font color=blue>1GB GeIL PC3200</font color=blue>
<font color=red>MSI GF 6600</font color=red>
80GB HD
Samsung DVD/CD Burner Combo
Windows XP Home

 

[fishmahn]

Otherwise identical drives (e.g. 7200rpm, 8mb cache) will perform almost identically PATA or SATA (drives are slower than ata/100, so having sata/150 means very little). The Raptor is a different issue because its a 10,000rpm drive, and is notably faster.

If you get a new 7200rpm drive it doesn't matter which you make boot. If you get a Raptor, definitely make it the boot drive, otherwise the only thing you improve is program load times. In either case, a faster hard drive won't improve gaming performance other than how long it takes to load a game/level.

A new graphics card will make more of a difference than a new HDD. I vote GPU.

Mike.