Best Hard Drive for Gaming?

djogoku

djogoku

New Member
As of today, when building a gaming rig what is the proven hard drive of choice?

a Seagate Cheetah 15K.6 ST3300656SS

a Western Digital Raptor X 150GB

a Western Digital VelociRaptor 300GB

a Solid State Hard Drive

If you can't think of one winner give your top 3 or top 5 or so on.
 
It would substantially be the SSD drive. SSD's are ideal for gaming. Although they aren't ideal in price, meaning you're going to spend $200 for about 64Gb+
 
data throughput on your drive is not really going to increase your gaming performance. It will increase loading times but it doesn't directly affect FPS or resolution really. If your system is actually paging virtual memory more than RAM, cache and VRAM then you've already got issues.
 
So SSD should be on the top of the list if you have no problem breaking the bank.


Money No Object
#1 a Solid State Hard Drive (SSD)

#2

#3

#4

#5

On a budget
#1

#2

#3

#4

#5
 
tlarkin said:
data throughput on your drive is not really going to increase your gaming performance. It will increase loading times but it doesn't directly affect FPS or resolution really. If your system is actually paging virtual memory more than RAM, cache and VRAM then you've already got issues.
Click to expand...

This list is assuming that everything you have (other than the hard drive) is already top notch
 
djogoku said:
This list is assuming that everything you have (other than the hard drive) is already top notch
Click to expand...

Then the point is even more moot. If you have a top notch gaming system it won't be paging the virtual memory at all during game play. It will call all instructions from RAM and VRAM, Cache and the processor itself.

The only time faster hard drives really improve performance is with data throughput. How much data do you need to process at once, it doesn't increase things like frames per a second.

Unless, load times is something that bothers you. Then a faster HD will load maps faster in game.
 
I guess that is something I would count as being a good enough reason to have a better hard drive. For me, if I'm going to go all out I figure I might as well maximize my gaming experience. Even my loading times. But with everything you've said in mind. From your point of view. What hard drive would you go with? I honestly just want to know so when I do make a purchase I'll feel like I've done my homework.
 
djogoku said:
I guess that is something I would count as being a good enough reason to have a better hard drive. For me, if I'm going to go all out I figure I might as well maximize my gaming experience. Even my loading times. But with everything you've said in mind. From your point of view. What hard drive would you go with? I honestly just want to know so when I do make a purchase I'll feel like I've done my homework.
Click to expand...

To be honest, I would save money by not buying an expensive hard drive and put that towards a better video card, more ram or even a second video card for xfire or SLI. Even better, another hard drive for data.

I typically run two drives in my systems I build. One runs Apps and OS and the other is for data storage. You can even use a partition scheme which will lower seek times, well technically, when a hard drive has to seek a smaller area it will search it faster...

If money were no object and I was going for pure performance I would go with a high speed 15k hard drive with as much cache as possible or a SSD. However, these drives won't really increase gaming performance. They would increase performance on things like loading raw video for editing on your hard drives, and stuff like that.
 
I was thinking along those lines myself. But then I stumbled across the 10000rpm hard drives. I also was wondering about the 16 or 32mb cache drives. A lot of good drive only have the 16mb. Is it worth it to go 32mb or will I not notice a real difference?
 
Yeah, 1TB is definitely a good amount for most when looking for somewhere to store just about everything.lol
If it were 72000rpm or better it would have made the cut.
 
djogoku said:
Yeah, 1TB is definitely a good amount for most when looking for somewhere to store just about everything
Click to expand...

For most yes but, some of us need more. LOL

My 750gb was almost full so I went through it and got rid of some stuff. Down to 200gb left now. But, that will change within the next month or so.
 
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