5400 RPM HDD with faster read/write speeds or 7200 RPM HDD

[Chris OMahony]

OK, so the past week i've been trying to bust my ass figuring out why I was getting unreal frame drops in one of my games and in another game textures wouldn't load in for ~30 seconds after they should.

I had an old 7200 rpm hdd lying around and I put it into my pc and installed windows in it, making it my main drive. My other hard drive, (5400rpm, 2tb, which was previously my only drive and had windows + everything installed on it) I would use for some games/programs that weren't as demanding on the HDD. I installed the game that I was having a problem with onto the 7200rpm, and I didn't see much of a difference.

The question i'm asking basically is which HDD is *faster* at the end of the day for gaming- and for example, would it be a good idea to install windows solely on one of the drives and then the games on another (the faster of the two?)

Here is the result of a test I ran to check the read/write speeds of both drives. Thanks for the help

https://prnt.sc/fwy60j

 

[dudeman509]

Paging out to disk while trying to load textures at the same time would certainly cause massive lag time.

Yes, Windows on one, games on the other would be good practice. I'd keep the larger of the two for games - as you appear to have it.

How much RAM is in your system?

 

[4745454b]

Computers are always getting faster. A newer part nearly always will be faster than an older part. (more so if you stay in the same general price bracket.) A new 5400/5900RPM drive will be faster than an older 7200RPM drive simply because it has newer technology in it. One big difference for HDDs is the increase in areal density. By packing the bits closer to together you don't have to wait as long for the disc to spin back around to read the next bit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Areal_density_(computer_storage)

Newer drives can also have newer firmware which can have better read/writing algorithms, and will have more cache on the drive to help with burst reads. I have two 4TB 5900 drives for mass storage and they can hit as fast as ~180MBps read. Here is PCMags review of the speedy Velociraptor.

https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2410360,00.asp

Notice they measure ~214MBps read which is only ~30MBps faster than my "slow" 5900RPM drive. You might think a 10K RPM drive would be tons faster, but that drive is older now and doesn't carry the newest tech. Finally I'd like to also point out that you CAN'T look at only one number and think X is going to be faster than Y. A chip at 3GHz can be slower than one at 2.4GHz. A 7200RPM drive can be slower than a 5400RPM drive. A SATA III drive can be slower than a SATA II drive. You CAN'T look at only one part of something and assume that it's better than something else. You have to consider the devices as a whole.

 

[Chris OMahony]

I have 8gb of RAM. Would you recommend then that I put the OS on the 1tb 7200rpm with slower read/write speeds and games on the other?

 

[4745454b]

They are both within spitting distance of each other. I honestly doubt it would make much difference. The only thing that really comes to mind is OS and "green" 5400RPM drives might not like each other. They tend to try and park the read/write heads which can lead to lag. Some allow this feature to be turned off, but you'd have to look into your specific drive.

I noticed nearly no difference between my 300MBps SATA II SSD, and my 525MBps SATA III SSD. Load times for games were nearly identical. Even though the one is MUCH faster than the other. 50MBps difference won't matter much, so do whichever you'd like.