Hard Drive: Latency vs. Bandwidth

[feelingshorter]

I was wonder if hard drives are like Ram. In which, after the first initial clock cycle in which the seeking delay kicks in then every cycle after that, it can transfer information. So say a hard drive has a high latency, so thats to say once it reaches its information, can it continously read/write considering the fact that the hard drive is partitioned? So which is better for games? Bandwidth? I herd someone say on these forums that games would probably be better for higher bandwidth ram wise. What about hard drives for loading it faster? I dont think a hard drive would affect FPS. But what about ram. Although i dont think latency or bandiwidth on ram would give better fps, but is that also to say games load faster if you overclock ur ram to have higher bandwidth?

Just a few questions i need to ask before buying my second hard drive.

I hope this isnt a repost, althought i did search for other similar ones, i cant seem to find any threads.

 

[feelingshorter]

no one?

 

[Pariah]

RAM and hard drives are not comparable, one is electronic while the other is mechanical. How a hard drive reads the data off the platters depends on where the data is on the platter. If all the data is nicely defragmented and contiguous in the same block, then there is only one access time penalty and the data is streamed until done. If the data is fragmented then the drive has to seek to the proper track for every piece then suffer a latency delay until the platter rotates to the proper position.

Latency vs bandwidth depends on the application. If the accesses are frequent and completely random like in a server, then access time is more important. If the access patterns are large file reads and writes like A/V eiditing, then throughput is more important.

It's not really an issue that needs weighing with hard drives, since generally speaking the hard drives of the same ATA generation from all manufacturers are in the same ballpark as far as performance goes.

If you want magnitude faster access times then you go with high RPM SCSI which also has higher throughput as well compared to ATA making it another non-issue.

As for RAM, not sure what to say, there isn't really much to choose from. Use the RAM that is designed to be used on the platform you use, and if speed is a concern then get the one with the lowest CAS ratings.

 

[cryptonomicon]

as far as gaming goes-

once the game or program is loaded into memory, most of the time the hard drive doesn't need to do anything again. the game sits in the ram and then that's it.
however if you didn't have enough ram to completely cache a game.. thats a problem. then you start having to use the hard drive's page file to cache the game... bad deal.
i think getting ram with decent CAS latency is a good investment, but very high end ram isn't really the best investment dollar for dollar compared to money spent in other components. YES faster memory speeds can improve FPS, the effect is there but is slight compared to the effect of faster video card or CPU. and for hard drives-- keep them clean/orginized and defragged always.

and overclocking is always a gamble, and it too big of a topic to go into in this thread, of which i'm not even sure what the question is. of course overclocking can improve performance but like I said it is a gamble and to the unexeperienced it can be very dangerous.

 

[feelingshorter]

overclocking doesnt kill, only voltage does. As for defragging, i do not use windows one, i use perfectdisk 7, although i herd there was a better defrager out there thought i never tried it. There was defrager that runs in the background always defraging while your computer is idle.