How badly can an old hard drive cripple a system?

[nutxo]

I had a few things happen and went from a decent machine to somehting kind of pieced together.

The last hard drive I had hanging around the house was an old 80gig maxtor ata66 with a 2 meg cache. How bad can a hard drive that slow cripple a systems gaming performance?

 

[Unkno]

it would slow your loading times

 

[RallyMaster]

80GB Maxtor ATA66? Are you sure that's not a 8GB? If it's a 5400RPM drive, it shouldn't be that bad. My parents are using two 5400RPM 20GB drives and they have no problem with it.

 

[phisrow]

Loading times will go up. Also, be very, very careful not to run out of RAM. Swapping will suck even more than usual.

 

[nutxo]

Originally posted by: phisrow
Loading times will go up. Also, be very, very careful not to run out of RAM. Swapping will suck even more than usual.

Im half thinking thats why my games stutter

 

[Truthiness]

Hm, this situation/question is the same one I am having at the moment. I'm using a 120gig Maxtor 2mb cache drive from a little while ago for data storage and to install games on. I'm wondering if my slow down on loading times is due to that factor because I have an X2 +3800, 7800 GT, and 1.5gigs of RAM.

-Truthiness.

 

[Bobthelost]

Well the 1.5Gb of ram won't help matters, you're taking a (small) performance hit there because at best you're in 2T command mode, and possilby in single channel too depending on how you did it.

But it probably is your HD at fault for loading times. The only time i hit more than 1.5Gb of RAM in BF2 was when i had 128 bots running round the map with me (that got a bit crazy for a while ) so you shouldn't be running out of it for normal use.