Hard Drive Help

[Nauticas]

I got a question regarding hard drive speed and how the RPM affects loading times in games.

I have 2 hard drives with the following specs. One is a 7200 RPM and the other 10000 RPM. I'm almost positive that these are both 3 GB/s drives. If they both have the same data rate, does the RPM speed even help?

I'm mainly looking to see if putting SWTOR on the 10K RPM drive will help with map load times and help with loading players and NPCs in crowded areas.

WDC WD32 00AAKS-75B3A SCSI Disk Device
Western Digital Caviar 7200 RPM
Model Number WDC WD3200AAKS-75B3A0
Serial Number WD-WMAT13907180
Firmware Revision 01.03A01
Size 298.1 GB
Marketed Size 320.1 GB
Cache Size 16 MB
Sector Information
Physical Sector Size 512 B
Logical Sector Size 512 B
Logical Sector Count 625142448
Supported Standards ATA8-ACS, ATA/ATAPI-7, ATA/ATAPI-6, ATA/ATAPI-5
Supported Transports SATA 1.0a, SATA II: Extensions, SATA Rev 2.5



WDC WD36 0GD-00FLC0 SCSI Disk Device
Western Digital Raptor 10000 RPM
Model Number WDC WD360GD-00FLC0
Serial Number WD-WMAKH1173527
Firmware Revision 33.08F33
Size 34.5 GB
Marketed Size 37 GB
Cache Size 8 MB
Sector Information
Physical Sector Size 512 B
Logical Sector Size 512 B
Logical Sector Count 72303840
Supported Standards ATA/ATAPI-6, ATA/ATAPI-5, ATA/ATAPI-4, ATA-3

[{CLR} Cobalt]

It will help some but were talking seconds down to milliseconds. I dont know if you will be able to really gain much. But trying wont hurt. You might google performance comparisons for the 2 drives at those RPM's.

[K PhaNTOM]

The maps are not THAT big. 100-200MB is nothing for a hard drive. That's 4 or 5 seconds to read/write. It's the time it takes to send out that command to do that and extract those maps. The only thing that might matter is the response time. SSDs have very short response time, when your CPU sends commands to the HDD, it might take the 7200RPM drive a second to figure it out. The 10K is a little better, and SSDs are .0001 second.

In conclusion, All pointless, your CPU and GFX Card are what matters. CPU to decipher the maps, and the GFX card to draw them out. Only switch to the 10K if you have time, and want to go "OMG DIS GAME SO SLOW AND I GOT 10K RAPTOR!"

[mapes]

Well if your file system is fragmented to hell the higher speed drive might help with that. Although your higher RPM drive does have half the onboard cache of the lower speed one. So as other have said it won't really make any diff prolly

[Nauticas]

Thanks for the feedback. I'll probably just try it out to see. For SWTOR, people who have a solid state hard drive tend to have much better performance in the congested areas.

I got guild mates with i5 processors, 570 gcards, with regular hard drives who lag and others with the i5s, 560 Ti, and SSD that have no lag.

[Nauticas]

Follow up question.

What is the best way to wipe a hard drive and repetition it?

[BLAZE86]

reformat twice?

[K PhaNTOM]

Follow up question.

What is the best way to wipe a hard drive and repetition it?

Control Panel \ System and Security \ Create and format hard disk partitions'

Or you can just reformat and use windows' built in functions to format the drive prior to installing windows.

[Donziboy2]

Dont let the sata speed fool you, they are not 3GB/s.

RPM speed comes in handy when you have to load files from all over the drive, the extra speed allows the head to reach those files faster.


From what I can tell both drives are at-least 5 years old....
Whats the rest of your specs? Maybe we can find something to give you a little more power out of what you have.

[ICEViper]

if you want to load maps faster I tell you an SSD is the way to go and they have dropped in price during the last 6-8 months. The new OCZ agility3 drive has over 500mbs read and write speeds. the raptor drives are good but they are not as fast as SSD's.