Are 10K RPM SATA HDDs worth it for gaming

[Link19]

Is it worth it to get a 10K RPM SATA HDD for running the latest games? Will there be a significant performance increase? I have heard of significant performance increases in terms of load times for the OS and games, but what about overall system performance including the performance during gameplay? Is it worth the money to upgrade to one of these drives?

 

[BW86]

no

 

[Philippine Mango]

Raids, Faster than 7200RPM (5400RPM I guess) drives, SCSI all won't have much of an impact on gaming except loading times. Like for DOOM III and Farcry you will cut down on loading times though. Also those would be good for getting windows to startup really fast. If I were to get a drive I would get a 15K SCSI drive as boot and a large capacity drive (mostlikely IDE) for storage or game installs. Or I could raid two scsi drives together and then have it as boot drive and for game installs, the large capacity IDE drive would be for storage of movie files, music etc.

The reason why it wont likely improve performance much is because games these days all load to the ram, unless your low on ram there wont be much performance improvement. I heard that there are some ppl who have played games with 128MB of ram or had thier system so that it was continuously pageing to the fast SCSI drive and it ran surprisingly smooth (according to them). I would love to see that happen! Run farcry with like 64MB of ram! OR maybe 32! HOW LOW CAN YOU GO!

 

[Pollock]

I'd probably go for 1GB of ram instead, since that means you won't even have to access the disk as often. Not to mention it has mainly been shown that having a faster processor can help a lot too, because a lot of it is uncompressing textures and stuff.

 

[airfoil]

You're not going to notice any increase in gaming performance by using a 10000 RPM drive. I'd buy a larger 7200 RPM drive instead.