hard drive effect performance?

Yes. You will notice a longer load time. I'd recommend a 7200RPM drive.
 
If a game needs to access the disk to load a file or something then, yes, a slower HDD can effect performance. CPU and GPU are the greatest factors but it is hard to say how much effect a slow hard drive would be on game play.

There are other factors that determine drive performance other than RPM. For instance, a drive with a 64M cache should perform faster than a drive with a 32M cache.
 
strollin said:
If a game needs to access the disk to load a file or something then, yes, a slower HDD can effect performance. CPU and GPU are the greatest factors but it is hard to say how much effect a slow hard drive would be on game play.

There are other factors that determine drive performance other than RPM. For instance, a drive with a 64M cache should perform faster than a drive with a 32M cache.
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The hard drive that came with the computer is actually a 7,200 rpm drive, I was mistaken on its drive speed. It only has a 16 mb cache size though, would that be an issue?
 
Thunderdome said:
I dont really care about load time, will it effect actual game play performance?
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I think you would care if the difference between loading your game in 2 seconds or 20 seconds. The ability to tab in and out of game smoothly. Not to mention the fact that if any other processes are utilizing the HDD, your performance will drop even more.

Most games use your PAGE file as a data file to swap info with - Your Page file is on your HDD. So yes, it does count.

If you got about $100-150, buy a good SSD. You will never want anyother HDD ever again....
 
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