How much does a harddrive affect performance?

[KNA88GT]

I have just upgraded my system and though it is leaps and bounds above what I had I still feel like I am not getting everything out of my processor and video card.

Here is what I have right now.

Athlon XP 1800
256 mb sdram
gainward geforce 3 ti200 golden sample
6 gig hard drive (its about 3 years old and left over from my gateway)
Win 98 se

How can I check the speed of my harddrive? Will going to a faster harddrive help gaming performance?

Also,can I have too much memory or not? I have heard that you can slow down by going to too much memory.Would I have to upgrade to windows XP to gain the full effect of more mermory or will 98 se support a lot of memory?


Thanks for any info.

 

[jcmkk]

I can garauntee you that it is 5400RPM. The HD affects performance a bunch because right now it is the slowest component in every system.

 

[Paulson]

Hard drive's are cheap, go out and get a 7200RPM drive... you'll be glad you did...

Think of it this way, the hard drive is the slowest performing component in your machine, which means you want to have the fastest one available to keep up with the rest of your system...

 

[Wolfsraider]

a friend of mine got a pentium 1 gig after i bought a p-3 866 i was the first5 to goto a 7200 rpm harddrive and it really speed my stuff up even video was amazing.

he wasnt happy after seeing my 866 take his in benches lol(i do have a better video card lol)
anyway i finally convinced him 6 months later and now he is very happy with his system

to end thishe now has a 40 gig 7200 and a 100 gig harddrive!

GET THE 7200 YOU WONT REGRET IT


hope this helps

 

[steelthorn]

I bought the new WD 100 gig special edition hard drive with an 8 meg buffer and I really can see
the difference. HArd drive speed really matters!

 

[KNA88GT]

Thanks for the replies.That is what I thought.The drives are the only thing that is left from my old system right now and it looks like I should order a new harddrive soon.I might have to wait a couple of weeks to do so as I just spent about 600 bucks and I am capped out this month.


Now for the important question.Which brand of hardrive should I get? I am looking for a highly reliable unit even if I have to spend more for it.I have heard the IBM drives have had some problems.Is seagate a good brand?

Is this a good one?

Seagate Barracuda IV ST340016A 40gb 7200rpm EIDE

Its only 79 bucks from newegg.

 

[Wuzup101]

Yes Cudas are good drives. As for IBM drives I have 2 60gxp's 20gigs each in raid 0 running on a 150mhz fsb and they haven't crapped out on me yet...not even a hint of crapping out. The 2 of them are fast as hell. I recently read at one of the larger hardware websites that IBM put glass platters in some of these smaller 60gxps like the ones I have; however, I can't confirm this in anyway.

As far as memory win98 se can handle plenty...you wont see any problem with 256 anyway. That's really not "a lot" of memory by today's standards. It's true WinXP and Win2k are probably better at managing larger chunks of memory (say over 512 up into the gb+ level). Upgrade if you want and have the money, but 98se was great to me (now i'm using XP pro) so I see no reason unless you want to (I had a free copy so I did).

 

[MisterDuck]

I'd bet the barn that your top transfer rate with that hard drive is somewhere around fifteen megs a second, and the low end is probably below ten. Recent 40 gig 7200 rpm hard drives (ATA66 or 100) are probably going to transfer data at a rate of 15-35 megs a second - much, much faster.

That's going to slow down a LOT when gaming, especially when you're loading anything - maps in particular. Once you're in the actual game, and everything's been loaded to memory, no - you won't see any performance gain in all likelyhood. But loading up things should be much, much faster.

Seagates make good hard drives (avoid the IBM 60gxp and IBM 75gxp - although some people seem to do fine, they also seem to fail more often than other drives) that are very, very quiet. I'd get whatever 40gb 7200 rpm drive is the cheapest, to be honest, since most of the claims people have regarding the reliability of a drive is based upon their extremely limited interaction with too few samples to really have a statistically significant argument against reliability. If reliability is an issue, you should make constant backups and consider setting up a RAID 0 - don't ask people for their "opinion" on what is or is not reliable, because it's just heresay and not worth your time, for the most part.

As for 98se and ram, I think se brainfarts when you get above 512 megs? It could be a gig - I don't remember - but at some point it has trouble dealing with that much memory space. W2k and XP don't have that problem.
Personally, I'd upgrade to w2k professional if you can.