Does the hard drive really matter in gaming?

[Gumby84]

In your personal opinion does the HD really matter when it comes to getting the most out of games. Besides the obvious faster loading levels is there any advantage?

 

[Kccdx2]

Ability to store more games? They are like 5gigs a pop now these days...

 

[flamingspinach]

I think he meant hard drive speed. In whichcase the answer would be, IMHO, no.

-fs

 

[Amaroque]

As far as FPS... NO

 

[Nohr]

If you got an adequate amount of memory and you're not hitting the swap file often, nope.

 

[Insomniak]

The only thing HDDs really affect in gaming is load times. In terms of rendering the actual gameplay, no. It is nice to have a nice fast file system though - it makes the desktop more responsive when multitasking and opening/closing apps left and right.

 

[Porter21]

another thread that asks if hard drive affects fps. lol lol. no, it doesn't, so i would go with a drive for about 50 or 60 bucks with at least 8mb cache.

 

[Anubis08]

RAM, CPU, and Vid Card gets you FPS. HDD speed gets you great install and load times.

 

[neuralfx]

Well not FPS but most 3d games, are disc intensive as far as loading and so forth; as well you will be doing some swapping. I would not cut corners in terms of performance of the harddrive. No you don't need a fast RAID-0 setup but I would get a decent HDD, a 7200 with 8mb cache, it is somewhat standard now. I mean remember your game is not just loading data about the levels but it is also saving data as well.
-neural

 

[KBtn]

I'm gonna also agree with the masses 🙂 No, HD speed is nat really a factor when it comes to gaming when you're dealing with a normal 7200rpm HD. They are making them bigger and cheaper these days since everyone seems to want the new SATA drives which give no real performance increase for gaming.

 

[stevty2889]

Yeah, it won't really affect anything but load times, and not by all that much, so any 7200rpm drive with 8mb cache is plenty good enough. SATA doesn't have any advantage in anything other than the smaller cable, but the connectors are fragile, so even that's not neccesarily an advantage.

 

[SunSamurai]

http://www.anandtech.com/stora...c.aspx?i=2101&p=10

Anyoen think these tests should be redone in a smaller stripe and differant motherboard? RAID0 improves preformance way better than that in loading games time and loading levels from a single drive configuration, and I didnt need a stopwatch to feel it.