Looking for a speedier Hard Drive

May 20, 2009 2:27 PM

I'd like to upgrade to a speedier HD for gaming, as I'd like to eliminate some lag in the texture loading. Could someone help me understand the performance difference between two drives?

My ram and videocard seem to be sufficient for the games I'm playing (2GB and 9800xt+), and I have a decent CPU (dual core 2.4Ghz), so this seems to be the next bottleneck.

This is what I currently have:

320GB Serial ATA Hard Drive 7200RPM, 16MB cache

I don't know the speed for the SATA connection, but I think it's 3.0GB/s. The drive came with my Dell machine.

This is what I'm eyeballing.

Cache is similar, but I don't know if the RPM increase is worth the significantly higher price. And would it make sense to go with a 32MB cache on another HD, vs. this?

I'd be open to suggestions for other HD's as well, if there's something that would provide a performance increase and is cheaper. And feel free to comment on some other performance issues I may be missing.

I'm not able to do a raid setup, so I'm looking for one faster hard drive.

Thanks very much.

posted by SpacemanStix to computers & internet (23 comments total)

Tons of review sites publish benchmarks about game level load times. Do some googling. For example, here's Anandtech's review showing some load time benchmarks. $200 is a lot to drop on something that's not even a 10% improvement over a cheaper 1 TB drive. I'd up the RAM to 4 GB and consider going quad-core before getting a Velociraptor.
posted by 0xFCAF at 2:33 PM on May 20

I'd up the RAM to 4 GB

I've been reading that you may not see a performance increase over 2GB, as games don't really utilize it. Would you think otherwise?

Thanks for the feedback, also.
posted by SpacemanStix at 2:38 PM on May 20

I've been reading that you may not see a performance increase over 2GB, as games don't really utilize it. Would you think otherwise?

Unless it is a specially written process (and 99.9% bet that it isn't), 32bit processes like most games out there are limited to 2GBs of RAM. However if you look at your task manager for your computer you'll see that there are dozens if not hundreds of processes going on so the extra RAM is for them so as to not hamper your game.
posted by mmascolino at 2:46 PM on May 20

Out of curiosity, do you mean a GeForce 9800gtx? the Radeon 9800xt+ is practically an antique these days.
posted by Oktober at 2:49 PM on May 20

If you see hundreds of processes going on when you open the Task Manager, it would be wise to try to reduce this number before you spend the money to upgrade the hard drive.
posted by box at 2:51 PM on May 20

If you only have 2 gigs of ram in your computer, once the video card, system functions, and everything else are accounted for, your actual game is probably not able to use more than a gig or so. Bumping that up may very well make a difference.

If you really want to see a difference, buy a ton of ram and get one of those ram-disk programs running (which turn your extra ram into a temporary hard drive). Load up the program onto the RAM drive and it will run as fast as physically possible.
posted by markblasco at 2:53 PM on May 20

More VRAM might help. A 9800XT is pretty old, most current video cards come with 512mb of more of VRAM.
posted by wongcorgi at 2:58 PM on May 20

Out of curiosity, do you mean a GeForce 9800gtx? the Radeon 9800xt+ is practically an antique these days.

Whoops, yes. It's the 9800gtx+.

If you only have 2 gigs of ram in your computer, once the video card, system functions, and everything else are accounted for, your actual game is probably not able to use more than a gig or so. Bumping that up may very well make a difference.

Okay, I'll add extra ram first to see what happens.
posted by SpacemanStix at 3:01 PM on May 20

You won't see an improvement over 3GB of ram, unless you are running 64-bit Windows.
However, that extra GB could make a much bigger difference by allowing more ram for the OS to read-ahead data off the HDD, and keep more cached in memory. Even though an individual process can only utilize 2GB, Windows can still keep additional data in it's cache.

Have you de-fragmented your drive? JkDefrag is great, free, and could easily have a far bigger impact than a new hard drive would.

Here's a thread discussing the relatively small difference in level loading times even with a raid0 setup.

One of the posts mentions an interesting test where he saw improved loading times by setting the game to use only one core. If you see a boost in loading times from that in the game(s) you are interested in, then going to a quad-core might help as well, since it frees up more CPU for things like decompression. You can do this from task manager by finding the game process, right clicking and selecting "Set Affinity." (It matters significantly how well threaded the games were coded.)
posted by SpookyFish at 3:10 PM on May 20

Basically in the case of your current drive it comes down to the spindle speed, 7200rpm vs 10,000rpm. By spinning fast the drive reduces access times to the data, meaning it is able to fetch/write data faster. The velociraptors are probably the fastest drives you can buy for a desktop computer - they blow away most 7200rpm drives. Some of the really high capacity drives come close when measuring some performance characteristics.

Check out some charts, it may help you decide: http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/3.5-hard-drive-charts/Average-Read-Transfer-Performance,658.html

I purchased a 150GB velociraptor a few weeks ago, the overall responsiveness of applications is amazing and well worth the price premium.

Others have suggested upgrading your RAM, and if you have a 64-bit OS this may help, but like others have said, not all applications are optimized to make use of more RAM. All applications will make at least some use of the faster hard drive, even if it's just when initially loading them.
posted by Sonic_Molson at 3:11 PM on May 20

What OS are you running? 32bit versions of windows don't even support over 3gb of RAM so upgrading to 4gb would be useless.

Also, I'd be surprised if upgrading to that hard drive you linked to did much for your gaming performance vs the price.
You'd also get better performance setting up a RAID 0 with two of your current drive than you would with just the 10k drive. I still never found any of this that noticeable though.
posted by zephyr_words at 3:12 PM on May 20

/crap should have previewed again.
posted by zephyr_words at 3:12 PM on May 20

This is what you actually want
posted by delmoi at 3:14 PM on May 20

I have a 32-bit OS (XP home). I'm thinking that it might benefit to go with an extra gig. I had been shying away from that in light of some of the discussions I was reading about it possibly being a waste of money, but this has helped clear up my thinking about it a bit.

Yeah, those velociraptors have a good reputation for speed, which was why I was considering that one. But I couldn't see from the stats alone why that might be the case. A couple of reviewers were saying that it was faster than their raid setup, as well as a SSD that they had been using. But it's hard to know how to take that.
posted by SpacemanStix at 3:23 PM on May 20

This is what you actually want

If that was cheaper and bigger, that would be great. I suspect that both will be the case in the not-too-far-off future.
posted by SpacemanStix at 3:26 PM on May 20

Don't think cache on the disk will make much difference for loading games. Cache helps when your reading the same thing repeatedly, but loading each new level will read lots of content not already in the cache.

Another option would be to use RAID striping, if your motherboard has a RAID controller. This lets you use two physical disks as one logical one, so you could get effective 14400 RPM reads with two cheaper 7200 RPM disks.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 3:26 PM on May 20

...when you're reading the same thing...

I must have acquired some sort of brain damage earlier today.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 3:27 PM on May 20

No, this is what you want

$110 ish - and just run your games off it.

But, n'thing RAM first.
posted by Xhris at 3:32 PM on May 20

Another option would be to use RAID striping, if your motherboard has a RAID controller. This lets you use two physical disks as one logical one, so you could get effective 14400 RPM reads with two cheaper 7200 RPM disks.

This was actually what I considered first, but unfortunately my machine doesn't support it. I've been gradually upgrading a computer that wasn't exactly made for gaming.
posted by SpacemanStix at 3:32 PM on May 20

Again, thanks everyone. This has helped me narrow down where I should be putting an effort into performance upgrades. I'll start with the ram; and the idea of the SSD just for games is intriguing.
posted by SpacemanStix at 3:39 PM on May 20

I can only question the sanity of anyone suggesting a PATA SSD of any sort - These are almost certainly using the jmicron controllers that have been causing stuttering and jitter in standard applications due to their abhorrent write speeds.

I wouldn't buy an SSD at this point unless it were a Samsung controller drive, a OCZ Vertex or an Intel drive. There's nothing worse than buying a premium product that happens to be fatally flawed. For detailed information about these drives, read this Anandtech SSD anthology. Especially the sections regarding random writes.

The best bang for buck right now lies in high density 7200 RPM Serial ATA drives - 320GB/platter drives like the Western Digital WD6400AAKS or WD3200AAKS (now known as the Caviar Blue line) or the higher end Black line of drives. These class of drives tend to be within a stone's throw of the Velociraptor line, and I believe beat the previous (Raptor) line of 10k RPM drives pretty reliably. You'll pay hefty premiums for mild performance improvements, most of which are actually only seen in artificial benchmarks and worst-case scenarios a single-tasking desktop user would never encounter.

That being said, an extra gig of RAM won't hurt, as it will provide more RAM for cache if nothing else, although XP's caching of disk is far less aggressive than Vista's.
posted by Rendus at 3:47 PM on May 20 [1 favorite]

Oh, and on the subject of cache on hard drives:

Don't put too much stock in the cache size. It's become a bit of a benchmark-boosting feature at this point. It'll artificially inflate burst read speeds, but that's a meaningless stat as what you wind up needing is good sequential and random read performance (mostly sequential for your use, but it depends on just what's being read in the end). You'll notice no real-world performance improvement in going from 16MB to 32MB cache, which is why the Velociraptors only carry 16MB. Look at real-world performance, rather than spec sheets for these things.
posted by Rendus at 3:53 PM on May 20

I defragged the hard drive and also added a gig of ram. The performance increase was amazing and sufficient to remedy my concerns (and only $15!). So it looks like a new hard drive would have been the wrong approach.

Thanks everyone for the helpful feedback, and to those who pointed me in the right direction.
posted by SpacemanStix at 10:15 AM on May 28