Are 10,000 rpm drives worth the cost?

[martinlest]

I am ordering a new system to run Microsoft Flight Simulator (FS9 & FSX). The basic specs are:

Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit
Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R Motherboard
Intel Core i7 950 3.06GHz - Overclocked to 4.00GHz
GeForce GTX 460 Sonic 2048MB Graphics
Corsair XMS3 6GB (3x2GB) DDR3 12800C9 1600MHz RAM

.. and I was thinking of 2 x Western Digital VelociRaptor 600GB 10000RPM SATA as the hard drives.

But the latter add a lot of money (like £300 +) to the system and I am having second thoughts. Can anyone say whether adding 10,000 rpm drives to the above rather than 7,200 rpm drives would make much difference to games performance? Over £300 worth (if any??)?

I'd really appreciate feedback. Thanks,

Martin

 

[mgrzTX]

I am ordering a new system to run Microsoft Flight Simulator (FS9 & FSX). The basic specs are:

Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit
Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R Motherboard
Intel Core i7 950 3.06GHz - Overclocked to 4.00GHz
GeForce GTX 460 Sonic 2048MB Graphics
Corsair XMS3 6GB (3x2GB) DDR3 12800C9 1600MHz RAM

.. and I was thinking of 2 x Western Digital VelociRaptor 600GB 10000RPM SATA as the hard drives.

But the latter add a lot of money (like £300 +) to the system and I am having second thoughts. Can anyone say whether adding 10,000 rpm drives to the above rather than 7,200 rpm drives would make much difference to games performance? Over £300 worth (if any??)?

I'd really appreciate feedback. Thanks,

Martin

In My Opinion the no 10000RPM SATA drive is worth it any more. You can get the space you need w/ better performance out of a Solid State Drive. Including slightly better gaming performance according to some. However in terms of gaming neither will make that big of a difference.

When talking about gaming the difference between a 10,000 rpm and 7,200 rpm drive is almost undetectable. The time it takes to boot your computer will be noticeably faster, as will the load time of the game, but in terms of actual game play not much of a difference. 10,000 RPM drives still have their niche, but the gaming community can really get better performance at a similar price for a SSD.

In short, if you don't want your hard drive holding you back, you can spend less than that much money on a quality SSD that will be able to house your Operating system and a game or 2 while providing the best performance you'll be able to find. SSD + 7,200 or 5,400 rpm HDD is the way to go.

 

[sminlal]

For the most part games read everything they need from the hard drive into RAM when they first start up - once they're up and running the speed of the hard drive is really not an issue. But you have to know your game - some of them may load new stuff from the drive when events such as scene changes occur, or when new characters appear on the screen in an online multiplayer game.

So for the most part you can expect that the extra money for Velociraptors won't speed the game up that much once it's loaded. The reason to buy them would be to make the system boot up and get your games started much more quickly. And for the cost of a couple of Velociraptors, you're probably a lot better off buying a single SSD - you'll get a lot better performance for your dollar. The only downside is that you won't have as much space available.

 

[martinlest]

Thanks - I do need quite a bit of space: SSD would cost a fortune for the capacities I would need for FS with all the addons.

 

[martinlest]

.. oh, and using Process Monitor one can see that Flight Simulator accesses the hard drives very intensively once a flight is under way, loading terrian and so on. Maybe 10000 rpm drives would make a difference with this software (the PC is only for Flightsim).

 

[mgrzTX]

Thanks - I do need quite a bit of space: SSD would cost a fortune for the capacities I would need for FS with all the addons.

I don't know the pricing where you might be, but you can generally get a SSD of 128 GB or 160 GB for < the price you listed for the Velociraptor. If you still don't think that's enough space, then something like 2x 320 GB Samsung Spinpoint f4s will give you performance that will be so close to the performance of the Velociraptors that you won't know the difference for ~100 USD.

 

[sminlal]

If you still don't think that's enough space, then something like 2x 320 GB Samsung Spinpoint f4s will give you performance that will be so close to the performance of the Velociraptors

The Spinpoint F4's are "green" drives with a slower spin rate. Putting them into RAID might increase their transfer rate, but it won't do squat for their access time.

So it depends on whether the game is stalling because it's reading a few big files (requires fast transfer rate) or lots of little files (requires fast access time). If it's the latter, then you'll need Velociraptors or (way better) an SSD to improve performance.

 

[swifty_morgan]

You have a nice system and you dumb-ed it down with that video card. Upgrade the video card to a 470 or better and get a couple of 7200rpm hard drives to run in raid. The SSD's are nice to an extent but aren't going to help anything in gaming except maybe to load the levels a little faster.

 

[geofelt]

The primary advantage of 10k rpm is lower latency. That is good, but nowhere near the negligible latency of a SSD. I do not know how FSX may or may not use the hard drive once it is launched. I might have assumed that for games, a ssd would not help much excepting for level loads. That assumption may not be correct. At IDF2010 there was a presentation showing this slide:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/sandy-bridge-idf-2010-amd-bobcat,2748-4.html
It shows that a SSD can help minimize some momentary hitches in game play. Read into it what you will.

A 600gb velociraptor would certainly be the best conventional hard drive you can get today. That would even include 15k enterprise drives which are tuned to server usage. Regardless, the performance difference among conventional 7200+rpm drives is not that great. A large SSD can be expensive, but prices are coming down. Expect to see cheaper 25nm SSD's this fall.

A good solution might be a hybrid drive which includes a small MLC cache like the Seagate momentus XT. Strangely, it is listed under notebook drives, being a 2.5" drive:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148591

Here is a review of it:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3734/seagates-momentus-xt-review-finally-a-good-hybrid-hdd/8

 

[mgrzTX]

The Spinpoint F4's are "green" drives with a slower spin rate. Putting them into RAID might increase their transfer rate, but it won't do squat for their access time.

So it depends on whether the game is stalling because it's reading a few big files (requires fast transfer rate) or lots of little files (requires fast access time). If it's the latter, then you'll need Velociraptors or (way better) an SSD to improve performance.

They still have the same read access times as the Spinpoint f3 and better average read time. The write times aren't quite as good, but you're not going to notice that while gaming really.

But yea, chances are the transfer rates aren't going to be the problem, it's going to be access times that will help you improve your performance.

That Caviar Black HDD is the best access times you'll probably get for the money along with a large amount of storage. In all honestly the difference between that Caviar Black and the Raptor will be barely noticeable, along with much more storage space. I would say if you're not going SSD, save money and stick with you're average 7200 rpm HDD.

 

[subasteve5800]

At a similar price as the two velocirapotrs you could get much better performance and more total storage space by using a 128gb SSD for your OS and other programs, and a 1-2 terabyte internal hard drive for data. I'd recommend the Crucial Real SSD C300 128gb (as long as you have a free Sata 6.0 Gb/s port) for the SSD and the 1.5 TB WD Caviar Black Hard Drive. Together those would be about 400 USD. Google tells me that's about 280 GBP so thats right in your price range.

 

[martinlest]

Thanks for the replies (keep them coming!).

I cannot use SSD, I meed a total of 500GBs absolute minimum for both FSX and FS2004. The cost, especially here in the UK where PC hardware is more expensive than in the US is just more than I can pay.

Flight sim reads the FS9.exe file hundreds of times a second, according to Process Monitor. I guess it's the access times that are crucial - the WD Velociraptors are c.7ms as opposed to Seagate's 14.5ms (the 'standard' drive offered by the guys putting the PC together - Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 1TB).

Given that I am pretty sure for Flightsim accesses the drive so much to read small files, maybe the Velociraptors would be worth the outlay in the long run. It's all down to frame rates in the end. If I get a 5% increase I've probably wasted almost $500 (for the two drives).

Decisions, decisons ..

Martin

 

[martinlest]

By the way, the GTX 460s came out really well in reviews. I don't think I'd gain much from the 470s - in any case Flightsim is a very, very CPU focussed 'game' (we simmers don't like to think of it a s a 'game', more a way of life!!) - the CPU in the system is an i7 950 overclocked to 4.00GHz

 

[martinlest]

Oh, yes, having a smaller SSD for the OS (Windows 7 64-bit) is an idea, but as I say, it is the FS9.exe file that is accessed so much (Process Monitor scrolls down so fast, and almost all the accesses are to the fs9 or fsx.exe file), so it's Flightsim that needs to be on the fast drive rather than the OS (no?). Also I have so much 3rd. party stuff loaded into FS9 that a flight can easily take 5 minutes to load (!). A 10000 rpm drive would help there I think.

Thanks again for all the input. More welcome - I want to decide and order in the next 12 hours here!!

 

[geofelt]

Oh, yes, having a smaller SSD for the OS (Windows 7 64-bit) is an idea, but as I say, it is the FS9.exe file that is accessed so much (Process Monitor scrolls down so fast, and almost all the accesses are to the fs9 or fsx.exe file), so it's Flightsim that needs to be on the fast drive rather than the OS (no?). Also I have so much 3rd. party stuff loaded into FS9 that a flight can easily take 5 minutes to load (!). A 10000 rpm drive would help there I think.

Thanks again for all the input. More welcome - I want to decide and order in the next 12 hours here!!

Based on your description of file accesses, look again closely at the 500gb Seagate hybrid drive and review I referenced earlier. The 4gb MLC cache is a learning cache which keeps your most frequently used data in it.

 

[martinlest]

I did follow the link.. 2.5" drive. Any comment on that?

 

[Wamphryi]

I think that people may be to quick to write off the Velicoraptor. I have 3 Velicoraptors two of which are a scratch drive in RAID 0. I also have a RAID 1 set up consisting of two Barracudas 500 GB each. I copied 5 GB of data from the single System Velicoraptor to the RAID 0 Velicoraptors. The transfer rate stayed at 120 MB a sec at a sustained rate throught the copy. When I copied the same file to the Barracudas the transfer rate started off at 100 MB a second and withing seconds had dropped to a sustained 40 MB a second. When reading and writing to the same array the Velicoraptors manage much better read write rates than other hard drives. They are proven technology that offer much better capacity per dollar than the SSD options. For the cost of a high end low capacity SSD you can put two Velicoraptors in RAID 1 and have performance, capacity and redundancy.

 

[martinlest]

Geofelt.. overclockers.co.uk (who seem like the best people to go with to build this) do offer small SSDs as options. The idea of the 'learning cache' is interesting, and new to me (can I read more about this somewhere?) but I assume that in getting 2 x 7200rpm drives and adding a smallish SSD I could not get the same effect? I am not sure overclockers offer the Momentus XT...

 

[martinlest]

Overclockers do not offer any RAID options (oddly). I am still thinking then of 2 x velociraptors 600GB each, no RAID .. but other options, especially the Momentus XTs are interesting. How would the performance of the Momentus XTs compare to the Velociraptors?

 

[Wamphryi]

According to Storage Review the Momentus is faster than the average 7.200 Drive but does not even come close to the Velicoraptor.

 

[geofelt]

Geofelt.. overclockers.co.uk (who seem like the best people to go with to build this) do offer small SSDs as options. The idea of the 'learning cache' is interesting, and new to me (can I read more about this somewhere?) but I assume that in getting 2 x 7200rpm drives and adding a smallish SSD I could not get the same effect? I am not sure overclockers offer the Momentus XT...

I at first thought that the 4gb cache was too small and puny, but the review tests showed it to be quite effective. If you had a small ssd, you would be responsible for moving whatever part of the 500gb drive to it, and moving it back when it was updated. An impossible task. The genius of the hybrid is that it keeps your most needed data in a copy in the cache.
If the drive is not available to you, it is a moot point.

If you go with the 600gb velociraptor, do not try to improve it's performance with raid-0. Raid-0 is only useful to speed up the data transfer of large sequential files. Raid-0 may actually slow down some accesses that span across two drives. requiring double positioning actions to get at one piece of data.

I would consider a SSD for your OS and apps. but I would wait on the SSD. there are supposed to be some 25nm gen 3 SSD products out this fall. They will offer larger capacities, lower prices, and be faster. You are at risk of buyer's remorse if you buy now. Instead, carve out a 160gb partition out of your storage drive, and install your OS and apps there. Plan on later cloning that partition to a new SSD. In the bios, specify sata mode as AHCI,( not IDE or raid) You will then use windows-7 drivers which support the trim command. It is very difficult to change tto AHCI after the os is installed without a reinstall. Trim is necessary to preserve SSD performance after the drive has been filled.

 

[Wamphryi]

I recommend getting RAID it offers a versatility to your storage needs now and in the future even if you dont want an array now.

 

[Wamphryi]

But as Geofelt says there is no real advantage to the RAID 0. I run two in RAID 0 as a Scratch Drive but I run my System off a single Velicoraptor. RAID 1 may still be desirable if redundancy becomes a concern.

 

[martinlest]

Can the Momentus XTs be put into a desktop OK? Not sure they would be compatible with the M/B, SATA II.. Like the sound of them...

Response from Flightsim community is that I won't see much performance increase getting 10000rpm drives over 7200., though tha's opinion thus far, no facts to say why. If the same exe file is being read so fast and so often, I'd have thought a drive with an access time of 7ms would be an advantage over one of 15ms..

 

[martinlest]

I wanted RAID 1, but it's not on offer as I say, so no RAID. No big deal in fact..