Good HDD for gaming?

[Shadrack]

What would be a good sata HDD or SSD to minimize load times in gaming? I currently have a 500GB seagate 7200RPM hard drive, and the load times aren't very good. Games run smoothly once loaded to my RAM but i'd like to minimize the load times as much as possible (while still affordable).

[0l33l]

Well, affordable and SSD shouldn't really be in the same sentence. Since games now take up a lot of hard drive space, you won't get many to fit on an SSD. However, the games that do fit on it would load very fast. Have you considered getting a faster hard drive (10,000RPM)?

[gwai lo]

One of the Raptors might shave off time, but I'd only go with the VelociRaptor if you were going to go the 10k RPM route. Otherwise, I'd stick with either the 640GB AAKS or 750GB F1 Spinpoint just because their performance across the board is much better than the other drives. They don't seem to do as well in game loading though.

http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/14964

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3303

If you're contemplating SSD and buying a hard drive just to get rid of loading times, I assume that the possibility of going RAID10/RAID0 wouldn't be too expensive. That might end up being a more cost effective solution.

[Tech God]

yea try a WD raptor

[jfree81762]

I have (2) 36GB WD Raptors set up as a RAID 0 for my main drive and my load times are pretty good. Once my car is done (the quest for more horsepower is never done I'm afraid) I can get those puppies upgraded to VelociRaptors.

[Shadrack]

how much of a performance boost do you think you get from a RAID 0 configuration? Would the 1x VelociRaptor smoke my current hard drive most likely?

[+shift. MVC]

1x Velociraptor would probably give you about the same performance as 2x640GB AAKS in a RAID 0.

There might be SLIGHT differences but not much.

[hawker1986]

You get a decent improvement with RAID 0, certainly noticable with boot times. If you wanted truely fast performance and money was no option then I would say get 4 velociraptors in RAID 0, but thats a bit excessive really. Personally I would go with Gwai Lo's suggestion of the 640GB AAKS or the samsung spinpoint drive, but you could get 2 for the price of a raptor and RAID 0 them for better performance. I dont know which option would actually be faster though :s.

Hawker

[Circaflex]

IMO raptors are overrated and i have 4 of them in raid0, either go with the aaks drives or save for some SSDs.

[gwai lo]

Somewhat related, but mostly just a hot deal:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...-L0A-_-22136218

Promo Code: EMCAHCFAD

84.99 with free shipping, that's a whole lot of performance for 13.28 cents per GB.

Two of these = comparable if not faster than single Raptor and it's way cheaper for 4.2666 times the storage space.

[Odom Member]

What are the rest of your PC specs? Or what makes you think your HDD is bottlenecking your load times?

[piehouserat]

samsung 500GB or 750GB F1 Spinpoint.

i know that the 500gb one loaded farcry faster than the WD raptor in benchmarks

[Shadrack]

What are the rest of your PC specs? Or what makes you think your HDD is bottlenecking your load times?

Hi! Good question! As far as load times go I'm pretty sure it is the HDD as that is when the HDD is thrashing :p.

Motherboard: Asus PK5-Deluxe

Processor: Q6600

Memory: Corsair 2x 1GB DDR2 SDRAM 1066 (PC2 8500)

Video: EVGA nVidia 8800GT 512MB

Hard Disk Drive: Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST3500320AS 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s

I'm planning to throw in a 2x4GB of the same "kind" of RAM along with this HDD/SSD purchase.

@gwai lo: I like the price. Thanks for the heads up. I'll look into that.

-Shad