PC gamers will often jump at the chance for increased performance; though the hard drive is often neglected when considering how one might go about this. This is partly due to techniques not being “mainstream” enough, though the bulk can be blamed on Solid State Drives (SSD) and their exorbitant price tag.
Gamers associate storage performance with costly SSDs, and while this is the case when ultimate performance is concerned, hard drives aren’t as slow as you might think. There are a lot of optimisations for hard drives ranging in difficulty from easy to slightly harder, though none are really beyond the average gamer.
Kingston HyperX SSD
Easy optimisations
Install games on a dedicated hard drive. This seems obvious at first, but many gamers just install their games in the default location on the C: drive, or on drives with other media on them. The C: drive is busy with operating system tasks and is the default location for page file memory, both of which will slow down level loading. In the case where media is on the same drive, how often do you game while listening to music? Or game at a LAN while others copy off your PC? Both of these will also slow down load times and are easily avoided.
Disabling page file is another technique that can benefit gamers who have more than 8GBs of memory, but for those who don’t, setting the hard drive cache on a storage orientated drive rather than the OS or gaming hard drive should increase performance. Along with this, users can disable services such as system restore to increase performance, but at the cost of system redundancy.
Buying a newer hard drive. While this involves spending money, buying a new generation hard drive for games storage will often result in greater performance. Due to technological advancements such as platter density, modern hard drives are often faster than similar capacity drives from years back. More data can be stored and read in a smaller space on newer drives, which means the drive can access the same amount of data at a lower rotation speed. This is why modern 5400rpm drives sport higher data transfer speeds than first generation 7200rpm drives. It is also why modern 500GB and 1TB 7200rpm drives are a relatively cheap way to noticeably decrease load times in games.
Western Digital Raptor
Harder Optimisations – Short Stroking
Short-stroking has become more popular of late in hardware enthusiast circles, though gamers haven’t joined the bandwagon as yet.
Short stroking is where you assign a large hard drive with a small partition (in most cases a 2TB drive with a 750GB partition). The theory behind this is that the hard drive will only make use of the outer section of the disk platter where more data can be read per revolution, resulting in higher data throughput. In theory using only the inner platter of the hard drive would lead to shorter access times as the disk head (the part of the hard drive that reads information off the platter) doesn’t have to travel as far to find information on the disk. This would involve assigning a large partition on the disk which is then left empty, followed by assigning a smaller partition where you would store your games.
This does result in the loss of usable space on the hard drive, as your 2TB drive is effectively a 750GB hard drive, but the performance boost puts the drive in the league of more expensive performance hard drives such as the Western Digital Raptor series.
Questionable optimisations
RAID. RAIDing for performance has been around for a number of years and most current generation motherboards support the feature. Due to this, the technique is popular among the more technically advanced gamers who aim to decrease loading times. The technique does increase the throughput of the device substantially, though at the cost of access time. In real world terms, the hard drive takes longer to find the information you are looking for, then loads it faster than normal.
At the end of the day buying an SSD will result in far greater performance than any of the above optimisations, though all this comes at a price. Large capacity SSDs are terribly expensive, and lower capacity SSDs which boarder on affordable don’t have a high enough capacity for most gamers’ needs.
It will be a long time before SSDs replace hard driver as storage devices for gamers. Until then, the above techniques should revitalise your system and keep you as up to date with hard drive performance as you can be without spending an arm and a leg.
Hard drive performance tips for gamers << Comments and views
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