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Game installs on 'green' HDD

N

number58

Member
I was wondering if there is a noticeable difference between the speed and responsiveness of game installs on a 'green' hard drive vs a normal one.

I'm thinking of upgrading to a SSD soon, but because my Steam folder is so large, it would have to be on the secondary hard drive. I'm torn between a WD Caviar Green 2TB and a Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB.
 
I wouldn't really say my WD Green drives are slow, but my WD Caviar Black is noticeably quicker all around. Considering gaming is one of the instances in which sequential read speed does make a big difference I don't see a good reason to use a green drive for the price difference.
 
The idea of having double the storage is tempting. I've got quite a bit of music and other files. But you can't argue with speed.
 
The only thing when speed matters is when you initially load the game and when loading a new level.

During play it does not matter at all. I have my steam folder on a green drive. And no issues at all. But then the price difference isn't that big considering you will also buy an ssd.
 
I agree, shouldn't make too much of a difference. A faster HDD is only going to speed up loading levels and launching the application.

Don't worry too much about it unless quickly joining multiplayer servers really matters to you.
 
I'm thinking that a pair of green drives in RAID-0 should be faster than a single "black" drive in most cases, while costing about the same and offering twice as much storage.
 
Get the Spinpoint F3. If the prices were the same the issue would be a little closer, but the 2TB Caviar Green is $90 whereas the 1TB Spinpoint F3 is on sale all the time for $55.

The Caviar Green has good STR, but unless you're really good at optimizing the layout out the files on your hard drive (installers generally do a crap job) you're probably going to see some chugging due to its low access times, especially in games that spread their data out over 50,000+ tiny little files.
 
All 2TB "green" models are currently $75 shipped. Density increases have made them quite good performers -indeed they may surpass "performance" drives of only a couple years ago. WD20EARS sequential read is about 133MB/s. Others may be faster. For maximum application performance, the drive can either be partitioned or organized with defrag zones.

Just using seperate drives for OS and games would likely net the greatest peformance increase with additional benefit from the OS drive being SSD and so any difference after that between the game drive being 7200 or 5x00 RPM is less significant. If the fastest possible level loads were very important with that configuration, then they could always be copied to the SSD as needed and accessed via junction points.
 
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