Does the HDD's RPM affect gaming performance ?

[moby90]

I'm talking about western digital green, blue and black.
The wd green has the lowest rpm, does the low rpm have an affect while playing games ?

 

[ss202sl]

Mostly it will affect load times. It will have very little affect on actual FPS.

 

[getochkn]

Yes, your games will load slower at the start and any hard drive access during playing will slow things down and cause lag spikes. Sometimes it may seem like a lot, but if your still loading and someone else is already in the game and got 4 kills, it puts you at a disadvantage. Stay away from green drives for anything other than basic storage.

 

[lonewolf7]

It depends on more than just the hard drive speed. Some newer 5400 rpm drives are faster than most older 7200 rpm drives. Mostly this is because newer hard drives tend to have information stored more densely on the spinning platters (so you have to travel less far in some sense to look over more data).

Keep in mind that hard drive speed has practically nothing to do with in-game performance. A faster HDD just allows you to load maps, levels, etc. a little faster (into RAM; the game will keep the data in RAM so it can be accessed much faster).

 

[Mun0425]

If you have a slow HDD, you will have very slow loading screens and you will have many more FPS drops and skips, this is because in game, the hard drive is not giving enough info for the GPU to process which forces delays to take place. The hard drive most of the time continuously feeds info to the card because most game maps contain over 1GB-2GB of space and the HDD must replace the old memory that no longer needs to be used with new data, the data that will be in use.

 

[hockster]

Hopefully this isn't a dumb question. If you have your OS loaded on a 10,000 rpm drive, and the game installed on a second new technology WD 7200 rpm drive, which drive is actually loading the game and affecting the load time?

 

[T3t5u]

Hopefully this isn't a dumb question. If you have your OS loaded on a 10,000 rpm drive, and the game installed on a second new technology WD 7200 rpm drive, which drive is actually loading the game and affecting the load time?

the drive that the program exists on