How important is HD access times to games?

[Eureka]

So, I've heard that hard drives can be a limit to some games. How important is this exactly? What's considered a good access time for HDs?

The WDBlack 1TB has 12ms, while the Hitachi 1TB has 17ms. Is this a big enough difference to warrant a $30 price increase?

 

[alyarb]

the $30 difference has to do with quality, reliability, and support. there are too many issues people have with hitachi drives and i would stick with WD.

the performance of a hard drive in terms of gaming primarily deals with loading the level. average throughput in this case is the determinant in how fast a level loads. if it's a large free-form game where the level in its entirety never loads, then it will load parts of it based on where you go and what you do. in that case, access time will become a factor. certain classes of disks perform in certain regions of access time. large 7200 rpm drives are typically in the 10-12 ms range. 10000 rpm disks are significantly less, and 15,000 RPM disks are even faster, but they are still in the several-millisecond range. solid state disks are the leaders here. an OCZ Vertex or Super Talent ultradrive have random access times of around 0.1 ms and average read of about 225-230 MB/s. SSDs like these and the intel X25 are the leaders at this.