good gaming hard drive

[stuckinasquare3]

I'm trying to replace a 140GB raptor drive with something larger but still good for gaming. I need something in the 300GB or more range but I don't want to pay a lot for it. What are some good drives/specs to look for in a fast HD besides just RPM

 

[Zap]

Samsung F4 320GB would be perfect for you. It is a single platter single head, so enjoys the highest platter density.

 

[stuckinasquare3]

How important is the RPM, cache size, latency, and throughput?

 

[yinan]

SSD

 

[stuckinasquare3]

I can't afford an SSD

 

[nanaki333]

zap is right on. spinpoint f4 320GB is the way to go for a cheap, quick drive. 2 of them in raid0 would be even better and cost under $100 giving you 640GB total space too.

 

[DirkGently1]

1TB drives like the Samsung F4 are dirt cheap. Are you sure you can't stretch to one?

 

[yinan]

I can't afford an SSD

Get a better job then

 

[nanaki333]

Get a better job then

as rude as that comment was, it made me LOL

 

[jjmIII]

1TB drives like the Samsung F3 are dirt cheap. Are you sure you can't stretch to one?

$55 @ Newegg With Promo Code: EMCYTZT465
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...mc=EMC-GD05162011-_-index-_-Item-_-22-152-185

While the 320gb F4 is faster, I prefer speed and more capacity.

 

[DirkGently1]

Thank you for correction. F3 is, as you guessed, what i meant.

What exactly is a 'gaming' hard drive anyway, and why has this silly expression invaded every part of my daily life? Will people be asking for 'gaming' DVD writers next?

 

[nanaki333]

Thank you for correction. F3 is, as you guessed, what i meant.

What exactly is a 'gaming' hard drive anyway, and why has this silly expression invaded every part of my daily life? Will people be asking for 'gaming' DVD writers next?

nope. only gaming blu ray

 

[supremor]

I find it rather obvious what a 'gaming' hard drive is. It's the drive he's going to install all his games to and he wants it to be as fast as possible for better load times and whatnot. Obviously SSDs are the fastest but as far as gaming goes their price per GB and negligible speed difference (talking strictly gaming here) make a nice fast preferably single platter mechanical drive or even a couple in RAID0 preferable.

 

[cebalrai]

I use Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drives in all my gaming rigs. Just $90 on Tiger.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...185&CatId=2682

 

[goobernoodles]

Thank you for correction. F3 is, as you guessed, what i meant.

What exactly is a 'gaming' hard drive anyway, and why has this silly expression invaded every part of my daily life? Will people be asking for 'gaming' DVD writers next?

You're clearly not 1337.

noob.

 

[greenhawk]

How important is the RPM, cache size, latency, and throughput?

firstly, RPM and latency are related, so not a individual characteristic.

As to which is more important for a gaming drive, it depends on the game. One that has large maps or reads larger files for loading the needed information can benifit from a good throughput read speed.

Some games have lots of smaller files and / or are continually loading the map as needed (ie: games that try to do away with pauses/map loading points), so through put is not as important as access times.

Cache size is generally a miss for game drives (unless caching the FAT tables) as most data is being read only with limited writing. Reading ahead in a file might help in some situations, but if the game is only reading what it wants, then reading ahead is ignorable (ie: filling the cache with the next part of a file that has not been requested yet).

Having a drive that can do the out of order featching that is one of sata's main advantages over the older drives can be important method of improveing the effecting access times, but helps to have a drive with a good brain on it, and this is the approach/path that WD did with their Black range. As to how useful that feature is, depends on the person and task.

If looking for a good non-SSD gaming drive, v-raptors are still pretty close to the best across all ranges / tasks.

 

[DirkGently1]

I find it rather obvious what a 'gaming' hard drive is. It's the drive he's going to install all his games to and he wants it to be as fast as possible for better load times and whatnot. Obviously SSDs are the fastest but as far as gaming goes their price per GB and negligible speed difference (talking strictly gaming here) make a nice fast preferably single platter mechanical drive or even a couple in RAID0 preferable.

So people who don't 'game' don't want fast HDD?

 

[supremor]

Not necessarily, a hard drive that would be used only for storage (media, backups) doesn't need to be fast whereas a hard drive used as a boot drive / game drive should be as fast as possible. When people label something with a gaming prefix I simply assume they are looking for something fast for the purpose of gaming like a gaming monitor, gaming mouse, gaming drive...
Some people will be willing to pay top dollar for the absolute fastest even if its not the most cost effective solution for what their doing. SSD's are much faster than HDD's nobody is arguing that but are they that much faster for the purpose of gaming? not from what I've seen.

 

[slyphnier]

worth to mention that 5400rpm drive have better reliability compared to 7200rpm
although there no real report but logically slower and less-hot = better reliability

 

[supremor]

Actually the newer 5400 rpm 'green' drives are notoriously unreliable from what I've heard. But I see your point that from a physics standpoint something spinning at 7200rpm is more likely to fail than something spinning at 5400rpm.

 

[allthatisman]

This myth that SSDs don't work any better with games is not true at all. Granted, some games will not see a ton of benefit in terms of load times, but ALL games will load faster with an SSD, and some more than others will load MUCH faster. For example, I just reinstalled the original STALKER, which had crazy long load times, especially at the "Sychronizing Client Data" part. With my very average SSD, the load times are much, much quicker than they ever were with the 150gb Velociraptor I had when I first played the game. I also reinstalled Far Cry 2, another game I initially played on the Vrap. Load times much improved. Like I said, there are some games (mostly online play) where you may see a load time advantage, but you still end up waiting for the slower HHD players anyway, so you still essentially are at the mercy of an HDD, lol. But almost every single player game is much improved.

Just youtube the WoW SSD load times video. It's glaringly obvious in that game.

 

[nanaki333]

games like WoW benefit greatly from SSDs

 

[stuckinasquare3]

Ended up getting two 7200.10 seagate drives from someone on the forums for cheap to run in RAID0

 

[greenhawk]

So people who don't 'game' don't want fast HDD?

not true, but I would expect fast HDD users that are not gamers would care more about noise than bentchmarks/fastest possible.

They would proberly care about price a lot more (ie: paying 50-100% more for 10% more performance is not acceptable to them).

 

[greenhawk]

worth to mention that 5400rpm drive have better reliability compared to 7200rpm
although there no real report but logically slower and less-hot = better reliability

all else being equal, then yes.

but in the real world, I would suspect that the drives would be made with lower tollerances and so sold cheaper, all at the cost of long term reliability.