harddrive for gaming PC

[juggalomike]

Ok, so i finealy have everything picked out for my new gaming PC, i was told on here to get two 150gig 10,000 RPM hard drives, however the thing is i sometimes download movies onto my PC, should i get one 150gig 10,000 RPM hard drive and say a 500gig harddrive? or would it be better to even say get 3 hard drives, two 150 gig 10,000 RPMs and a 500gig for movies and such? keep in mind this system is costing me about 3k, im not looking for a cheap way out i want the best that i can get(without spending 10k of course lol)

 

[Navid]

There is no considerable benefit from a fast hard drive for a gaming PC!

 

[juggalomike]

what are faster HDs for then? i always thaught it allowed your system to load memory faster, which is good for games where you have to load various maps such as call of duty 4

 

[OdiN]

You may see small increases in map loading, but other than that you won't see any benefit. Well maybe it will install the game a bit faster

Faster HD's are better for video editing and such. Or for multitasking.

 

[Blain]

System memory is far faster than the HDs.

 

[juggalomike]

Originally posted by: OdiN
You may see small increases in map loading, but other than that you won't see any benefit. Well maybe it will install the game a bit faster

Faster HD's are better for video editing and such. Or for multitasking.

ok, well as far as multitasking im going to be running 64bit vista, would that make it worth while?

 

[OdiN]

Originally posted by: juggalomike

Originally posted by: OdiN
You may see small increases in map loading, but other than that you won't see any benefit. Well maybe it will install the game a bit faster

Faster HD's are better for video editing and such. Or for multitasking.

ok, well as far as multitasking im going to be running 64bit vista, would that make it worth while?

It all just depends on what you are doing. If you are doing a lot of data-intensive stuff which relys on reads/writes to a HD, then yeah a faster HD is better, and in that situation you may well see the benefit of a RAID array as well.

But for typical PC stuff, you won't see a huge difference.

I have 2 74GB Raptors in RAID 0 and I like them. But depends on what you do. The OS won't matter really, more the programs you run, tasks you do.

A plus with the Raptors is that they are enterprise class drives and are built better and have longer warranties.

 

[tjaisv]

Well if you want the best hd setup then go with a couple of these babies: Fujitsu MBA3300 300GB 3Gb/s SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) 3.5-inch 15K RPM 5-year warranty... (drive availability TBA, they should be out soon though). If you don't want to wait, then a couple Fujitsu MAX3147RC 15K 147GB SAS drives ($289 each) will work nicely too.

Pair them in RAID0 with an Adaptec 2251800-R PCIe-4x SATA/SAS 3405 KIT Controller Card, $307 (supports up to 4 SATA and SAS drives)

You're going to have to pay a premium for this setup, but it just might be worth it for u.

 

[0roo0roo]

Originally posted by: juggalomike
what are faster HDs for then? i always thaught it allowed your system to load memory faster, which is good for games where you have to load various maps such as call of duty 4

drives got faster with every increase in density.
it is at a point where all drives are quite fast unlike in the past.
loading is not significant portion of game play. game play is only affected by ram/cpu/gpu. games don't need to load that often, we are in the days of cheap ram after all. if you MAX those out first then you should funnel resources into drive speed. 3gb ram, fast quad core, fast gpu perhaps sli, all perhaps overclocked and or water cooled, and a biggass lcd screen.
if you have unlimited budget, get some SSD Mtron discs and raid them for uber speed.
$$$

 

[Navid]

If you edit images using photoshop, where large data files are stored in cache and you have several levels of undo, every time you do something, the hard drive is accessed. Then, you will benefit from a faster hard drive.

When you play call of duty, the map is loaded from the hard drive into the RAM in a few seconds. Then after that, it is only your graphics card, RAM and CPU that determine your fps, until the time comes for the next map. Overall, the hard drive speed does not make much difference.

 

[fire400]

RAID 5 with 3x 15K RPM SCSI drives on an LSI Mega.

You notice a few extra frames, sure. But is it worth the money, only if you want the games to load up faster.

quadcore 3.6GHz
4GB of 1400MHz RAM
8800 GTX SLI 1GB total

the closer you get to finishing your undergrad, the more you will regret the money you've wasted on crap like this.

if I were you, I'd go with a two raptors, and get another seperate SATA300 drive just to satisfy the speeds of clickiness.

 

[imported_Tick]

To me, and a lot of people will disagree with this, a fast hard drive IS worth it for gaming. I say this because the more time you spend staring at loading screens, the poorer the game continuity is. Ever play NWN2? It's annoying as shit how much time you can spend staring at loading screens.