Does gaming storage need 7200rpm?

[ForYourHealth]

I bought a 5400rpm HDD on accident because it was on sale on newegg (it wasn't advertised as 5400, a bit of a scam if you ask me). I am going to use it to store my games and I'll be using a samsung 830 128gb SSD as a boot drive.

Will I see a performance decrease in the games with a 5400rpm HDD? Also, it only has a 32mb cache.

I just want to know if upgrading to a western digital caviar black 7200rpm, 64mb cache will be worth the $27 return cost of the stupid "Samsung" (actually seagate) ecogreen I bought naively.

 

[Skippy27]

5400rpm drives are a lot slower than a 7200rpm drive.

Does it need it? No

Would I ever use a 5400rpm drive for anything? No

Is it worth the cost? That is only for you to decide, but I personally would pay the extra $27 for it.

 

[burns11]

I did the same thing and I'm going to keep it, it's plenty fast enough for mass storage, the price was right for 2TB, and if I find it too slow for games I'll just add in a 500gb 7200rpm or even another 120gb SSD.

 

[motorneuron]

Well, this depends on how you plan to manage your games. If you decide that you'd like to keep basically everything but your OS and a browser on the boot SSD, then you should definitely get a 7200 RPM drive for games. But with my 128 GB SSD, I tend to use Windows 7's directory join command and copy the actual files for the games I'm currently playing to the SSD. The HDD is then for movies, music, and the "archived" game files (games I'm not playing at the moment or play only rarely, or which don't have big storage needs). I think a lot of people do something similar given the prices of SSDs vs HDDs. If you're doing that, though, you may not care about the speed difference.

 

[bucknutty]

The only place you might see a difference is the loading of new games or levels.

For example an MW3 match would take my computer like 30 seconds to load. If the host had a ssd the game would start after like 5 seconds so I would get into the game 25-30 seconds late. At that time the first domination point was already capped.
By moving MW3 to my SSD the game loads in like 5 seconds and I am never late to the party.

 

[ForYourHealth]

So I could just use the HDD as storage and copy the games I want to play to my SSD?
I'm kind of a binge gamer and I only play 1-2 games at a time, so that sounds like it would work for me.

How do you do that, motorneuron/bucknutty?

 

[bucknutty]

I use steam it is installed on my regular HD. Games like BF3 MW3 and ME3 all seem to have very long loading times. So I made a folder on my C: root (ssd) called games. I then copy the game from the steam directory on d: into the games folder I made on the C: ssd. I then use the mklink command for the dos prompt to make a linkshortcut that steam sees. This allows all my steam stuff to stay, update and live on the D: but keep only the games I want on the ssd. When I get tired of the a game I just copy the games folder back into the steam directory on the d: drive.

Google mklink or mklink steam, there are a ton of guides. It sounds complex but it only take like a minute to do.

 

[motorneuron]

I use steam it is installed on my regular HD. Games like BF3 MW3 and ME3 all seem to have very long loading times. So I made a folder on my C: root (ssd) called games. I then copy the game from the steam directory on d: into the games folder I made on the C: ssd. I then use the mklink command for the dos prompt to make a linkshortcut that steam sees. This allows all my steam stuff to stay, update and live on the D: but keep only the games I want on the ssd. When I get tired of the a game I just copy the games folder back into the steam directory on the d: drive.

Google mklink or mklink steam, there are a ton of guides. It sounds complex but it only take like a minute to do.

+1

 

[ForYourHealth]

Thanks a ton for the help, guys!

That is definitely how I'm going to do it. I see no reason to spend a bunch of money upgrading to a 7200 rpm drive that is used solely for storage.

 

[DarkOutlaw]

if you have a 120gb ssd you should be able to install the OS + critical apps + 4 games and still have around 30gb free. You should only store files on the hdd, so it shouldnt really matter unless your doing some beast video editing.

 

[J_E_D_70]

You can also try steammover to put games and other programs where you want them.