Best HDD for gaming?

[Tool Man]

Hi,
I'm looking to build a new PC to replace my antique old Athlon XP system that I built like 4 or 5 years ago.

I've already picked most of the components, but I need some advice on a hard drive.

I usually have a few HDD's in my tower, because I like the keep the 'C' drive as clean as I can, it's just for windows and installed games and apps, all my other stuff, videos, mp3, downloads etc goes on a seperate drive.

So, I'm looking for maybe a 500Gb SATA drive as my new 'C' drive, and would like it to be as fast as possible.
I'm not bothered about the 'D' drive, because any drive will do for that, it's just for storage. (I have a NAS backup anyway).

So can anyone suggest a good drive? What's more important, spindle speed, cache size or whatever?

Thanks.

[poisondeathray]

If you can afford it, get a SSD, like MTRON or Memoright GT. ~ $700-800 for 32GB

Next choice would be a Velociraptor (10,000rpm) ~$300 for 300GB

Both these are much faster than conventional 7200rpm drives. There are many review sites out there, just do a quick search

Spindle speed generally leads to lower access times. Cache has minimal effect these days on performance (i.e. a 32GB cache will not necessarily outperform a drive with 16GB). These days, it's firmware that makes the difference drives.

[Tool Man]

Thanks,
Is it safe to use SSD as a main drive? I always thought the constant read/write would quickly kill a solid state drive.
Anyway, the capacities are too small for me.

I looked up that WD Raptor, and it looks pretty sweet. 300Gb is a bit lower than I wanted, but it does seem to be the fastest available. I managed to find it for sale here in the UK for £184.

http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx?Quicklinx=53K4&CategorySelectedId=11154&Navigatio...000,4294959438

Looks pretty good too, never seen a 2.5" used on a desktop like that, seems to come in a 3.5" chasis with a heatsink!!

Thanks man, I think thats what I'll go for.

-Alan.

[jagabo]

And after paying twice as much for a fast drive you'll save a few seconds off a 60 second boot time or game load time.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3303

[Krispy Kritter]

Aside from game load times, any of the 7200 HDD's will work just fine. And the difference between a 10k and a 7200 rpm drive isn't that great.

[Joe The Dude]

Wouldn't a raid stripe across two identical SATA 7,200RPM HDD's be faster than
a single 10,000RPM Hard Drive, though?

[jagabo]

Depends on usage scenario.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cheap-raid-ravages-wd-raptor,1562.html

Unless you have some particular need for 10K and/or Raid0 you're wasting money just to save a few seconds here and there. Unless you spend a lot of time with large sequential reads and writes, or running random access tests, you will see little benefit from either, or both. In the article linked above all the synthetic benchmarks show big increases in performance but the real world benchmarks (Windows boot time, Sysmark 2004 SE Application Performance) show very little.

Of course, if it's really important to you to save 2 seconds off your Windows boot time, use 10K RPM drives in a Raid0 array. Hell, why stop there. Spend some really big bucks for a pair of 15K RPM SCSI Ultra320 drives. Your neighbors will really be impressed by the noise and heat radiating from your office!

[ViRaL1]

Fibre Channel!:P