Good upgrade for gaming drive

[Texashiker]

My sons gaming drive is just about full, and is in need of an upgrade. The current drive is probably 4 years old (rough estimate), 160 gig, has about 20 gigs free and I "think" its a seagate.

Operating system - windows xp professional 32 bit

Configuration is like this:

Drive A - boot and non-game programs
Drive B - games only

What would be some good buys in the $50 price range?

Newegg has a seagate 500 gb drive, with an average latency of 4.16ms, 16 meg cache and only cost about $40 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822148395

Most of the western digitals in the same price range have almost double the seek time and same or less cache.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Newegg has a seagate 500 gb drive, with an average latency of 4.16ms, 16 meg cache and only cost about $40

Most of the western digitals in the same price range have almost double the seek time and same or less cache.

latency is NOT the same as seek time. latency is rotational latency, which is a fixed amount, based on the RPM of the drive. Seek time is how long it takes to mechanically move the heads from one track to another, and access time is a combination of seek time + rotational latency.

Most 7200RPM HDs have an access time of between 12 and 14 ms.

I would get a 1TB, 7200RPM HD, myself. Better to spend $20 more and get double the capacity, to extend the useful life of the drive. Plus, the 1TB drives are faster.

Edit: Get this one:
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2143426