Western Digital Black Series....they are the best overall when you compare reliability/performance/costs. They aren't the fastest drives, but they are the only drives on the market that I would buy without flinching.
Just get a fast 7200RPM HDD with perpendicular recording for now. In a few years, the SSD might be worth the cash and offer a significant performance boost. Sure, you can get a 15,000K RPM SCSI drive, but keep in mind you also have to buy a SCSI controller card.
As mentioned above, load times will improve, but once the game is in memory, it should not be a factor.
Avoid "green" drives like the plague, it is marketing for a slow HDD. Checkout the Samsung Spinpoint Fx series and the latest Seagate 7200.x series, they are the best bang for your buck and the price you pay for decreased load times will be several fold more if you look beyond highend 7200RPM HDD.
HDD usually only has an impact on loading times, and pretty much never affects the actual game once you are in.
That's not strictly true for all game genres. Many open-world type games constantly stream in and out level data and geometry as you move around.
one would assume that the developers would make the games w/the one of the slower drives in mind - 5400 since that is what most "pre-built" rigs ship w/. i have never seen a game need the random access times of a ssd or 10-15kscsi
5400 since that is what most "pre-built" rigs ship w/.
Avoid "green" drives like the plague, it is marketing for a slow HDD.
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3403&p=14
SSDs improve min FPS in Crysis benchmark
LOL, no. Most "pre-builts" ship with 7200rpm drives.
As for 15K rpm SCSI and SAS drives, these drives are very loud.
oh, my bad on the 5.4k comment - guess i was looking at the extra cheap setups, but 15kscsi/sas drives are maybe slightly louder than current 7.2k hdds, they are really not that much louder, not enough to make you think - not like the old 10k that sound like a circular saw