Hard Drives.

[KeepItRed]

I need to decide what's better for my rig. I'm a heavy gamer and I want to know what's better for performance:

Seagate 120.0GB w/ 8MB cache 7200RPM

Western Digital Raptor 74GB S-ATA 10,000RPM

Another question: is the Neo4 Platinum mobo compatible with both these drives?

 

[HDTVMan]

Raptor is faster hands down. But wont make any difference once the game loads its information. So you only stand to gain a small improvement on level loads.

 

[KeepItRed]

Is it true that if you have a 160GB 7,200RPM, it's slower than a 120GB 7,200RPM HD?

 

[Valkerie]

Originally posted by: KeepItRed
Is it true that if you have a 160GB 7,200RPM, it's slower than a 120GB 7,200RPM HD?

all depends on the OS environment - if it's clogged up with clusterish trash, defrag your drive frequently for optimal performance, and don't install software you don't need or will ever use. on the other hand, response time matters. also, check out the cache, some drive come with 2mb, 8mb, and 16mb cache usually. Higher cache is better.

And depends what type of drive it is, IDE or SATA. SATA is faster. If one of the drives has NCQ, the performance will notch up a bit. NCQ will rearrange data to go through the processing and storage procedure. Some drives come with extra technology to help drives perform better than others, but primarily, RPM, interface type, and cache will basically determine the outcome of your drive (assuming little or no bottlenecks are present with CPU, OS, RAM, mobo technology, etc).

 

[inveterate]

Raptor is a waste if u don't get 2 and put them in Raid 0,,,, so just get a seagate barracuda with 8ms seek,, that's the fastest

 

[HDTVMan]

There are too many factors that determine a drives performance. It cannot be simply determined by rotational speed.

I will try to make this as basic as possible.

The biggest factors are the following.

1- Access Time. The time it takes the arm to move to where the data is to read it. Example Dinner Time: You and a friend start at the same point, You walk, He Runs. The person who gets their first can start eating.

2- Platter Density. A 3inch platter that is 80gig has its bits close together than a platter that is 40 gig. 80gig is twice the density and at the same rotational speed the 80gig platter is passing over twice as much data per revolution.

3- Rotation. Obviously a 10K RPM is going faster than 7.2K RPM

Those are the biggest 3.

This is why in some cases a 7200RPM drive with a higher platter density can outrun a 10K Rpm drive with a lower platter density. But the raptors have an incredible Access Time too and since most data is in small chunks the raptor wins most items.

So the dinner bell rings. You walk and raptor runs to the dinner table. Raptor eats a chicken wing and goes back to where it started. You arrive during raptor finishing a chicken wing and begin to eat yours. Raptor has already won in small food portions.

So the dinner bell rings. You walk and raptor runs to the dinner table. Raptor begins to eat 50 chicken wings. You arrive on raptors chicken wing 10 but you can eat 2 chicken wings as a time becuase your platter is denser than raptors by the time raptor finishes wing 40 you are finished and begin to walk back to where you started. Raptor finishes shortly after but you are already done. This is the case in large files that can be streamed. However most files are not continuous and are broken all over the place which is like the earlier example.

So what did we learn.

Defrag your hard drive for performance increases on large files.

 

[Hurricane Andrew]

Raptors would be nice, but the 7200 RPM Seagate sure won't be your bottleneck in gaming. Keep the extra dough and kick you video card up a notch or two (or add more RAM---prices seem to be ticking up, so now's the time to buy for the next several months). Besides, I'd rather have the extra storage capacity...