Hard drive performance tips for gamers

It is also why modern 500GB and 1TB 7200rpm drives are a relatively cheap way to noticeably increase load times in games.
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Due to this, the technique is popular among the more technically advanced gamers who aim to increase loading times.
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I think you mean "decrease" loading times...
 
sata3 drive with a sata3 pci card if you dont have sata3 ports on your mobo ... thats an increase in performance i tell you :)
 
I'm no expert but just thinking about it logically, wouldn't the outer platter give faster read times as in one spin of the drive, more distance can be covered.

Otherwise, good article. :) But I don't even have a SATA3 yet. So I'll just stick to what I got.
 
Do you guys keeo your harddrives always on, or do you let windows power them down after awhile? I changed the power settings to keep them always on
 
Rain Moodly said:
Do you guys keeo your harddrives always on, or do you let windows power them down after awhile? I changed the power settings to keep them always on
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I also changed the power settings to keep them always on. Useful, especially if you are on a file sharing network.

As for the performance of the hard drive, Civilization 5 takes almost 5 minutes to load a saved game and I found no way of speeding that up. A very hard drive intensive game!
 
Interesting article.

HoboMincer said:
I'm no expert but just thinking about it logically, wouldn't the outer platter give faster read times as in one spin of the drive, more distance can be covered.
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Your statement seems logical, but it is like burning a dvd. The closer the head moves to the inner side of the dvd the faster it writes/reads. (smaller, thus faster area to access)


Rain Moodly said:
Do you guys keeo your harddrives always on, or do you let windows power them down after awhile? I changed the power settings to keep them always on
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+1 Rain Moodly
 
I recently upgraded from 3 to 4 drives in raid 0, the performance increase is definately notable during load times aswell as during game play.

Ive seen some reviews and it seems on most onboard raid controllers , going over 4 drives causes erratic read/write times due to the limitation of the onboard controllers.

Does anyone here have a favorite tool to test read/write speeds ?
I will do a benchmark and post the results.
My raid0 is set up with 4 samsung 300gb sata2 drives.
 
SSD's are faster sure, but at the price, I don't feel it justifiable. And yes, i recently bought a SSD, but in hind sight, I would rather have saved the cash.
 
afsrav said:
Your statement seems logical, but it is like burning a dvd. The closer the head moves to the inner side of the dvd the faster it writes/reads. (smaller, thus faster area to access)
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Really? :/ Can someone please explain why or how this is?

Is it not that the dvd still writes at the same speed just that it seems faster because it completes each revolution quicker and can move on to the next line quicker? Not that more data actually gets burned in less time?
 
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