HDD 1TB 7200 RPM vs HDD 2TB 5400 for gaming ?

[hamada.hosny93]

Hi guys, currently i'm building up a new pc for gaming, and because i wanna try so many games with high spaces i decided to buy 2TB HDD Western Digital Blue.

But i have found out that the WD blue HDD 2TB is only 5400 RPM and i was hoping for 7200 RPM, honestly i have no experience about difference between both speeds with gaming.

Well i searched for another one with higher speed and i have found the black version of WD but in my country here it costs twice the price, that will be too costly with my current budget.

I have found another HDD with 7200 RPM, WD black with same price but with less space 1TB, I'm really confused and don't know what to buy. I need both higher storage and best performance for gaming

so any recommendations guys??

2TB HDD WD blue 5400 RPM, does it worth with gaming?

My expected build for the new pc:
GTX 1060 6GB
RAM 16 GB 2400 or 2666 (depends on budget)
Motherboard: B360 or H310 (depends on budget)
Processor core i5 8400 or 8500 (depends on budget)

 

[captaincharisma]

a 7200RPM drive will have a small increase in load times over a 5400RPM one. there are seagate's SSHD drives but they are not really worth it because they are just slow 5400RPM drives with a small solid state chip built into them. WD black drives are the best performing HDD you can find right now

 

[hamada.hosny93]

a 7200RPM drive will have a small increase in load times over a 5400RPM one. there are seagate's SSHD drives but they are not really worth it because they are just slow 5400RPM drives with a small solid state chip built into them. WD black drives are the best performing HDD you can find right now

So you recommend WD black one 1TB 7200 RPM instead of the WD blue 2TB 5400 RPM ?

Well but i have referred to a problem that i need more storage for many games that i wanna try ... I know generally that black is the best but i need to know the difference between both speeds in gaming ??

Regards

 

[Solandri]

If you're only considering WD drives, avoid the 5400 RPM ones, especially if this is also going to be your OS drive. The 5400 RPM WD drives have a head parking issue which can cause stutter in games. The 7200 RPM WD drives seem not to be affected, nor are drives from other manufacturers.

http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-3291249/hdd-giving-problems-games.html#19105974

In this day and age with a new build of moderately high specs like yours, I would recommend going with whatever is cheapest, even if that means re-using an old drive from your previous computer. Then use the money you saved to help pay for a 250+ GB SSD. It makes no sense to put together a nice system like that, then cripple it with only a HDD.

 

[hamada.hosny93]

If you're only considering WD drives, avoid the 5400 RPM ones, especially if this is also going to be your OS drive. The 5400 RPM WD drives have a head parking issue which can cause stutter in games. The 7200 RPM WD drives seem not to be affected, nor are drives from other manufacturers.

http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-3291249/hdd-giving-problems-games.html#19105974

In this day and age with a new build of moderately high specs like yours, I would recommend going with whatever is cheapest, even if that means re-using an old drive from your previous computer. Then use the money you saved to help pay for a 250+ GB SSD. It makes no sense to put together a nice system like that, then cripple it with only a HDD.

Thanks for info, so you last recommendation is going with the cheapest one ... for me the cheapest one is WD blue 2TB 5400 RPM ... should i go with it? and with my current moderately high specs as you described will it perform good with gaming or i will face freezes because i don't wanna face any kind of freezes, actually i'm looking forward for smooth performance in gaming but honestly i can't afford additional SSD to my current build, the reason for that is because 2TB HDD 5400RPM + SSD = cost of 2TB HDD 7200 RPM or even more than this, that was the main problem :/ :/ :/

anyways i'm just asking if there will be any probability of performance's loss with the 5400 RPM ??

regards

 

[bigpinkdragon286]

The performance difference between a 7200 and 5400 RPM drive is hardly worth paying extra cost. Even the 5400 RPM Shingled Seagate drives can manage 150 - 190 MB/s throughput, and those are not known as high speed drives. Provided you're not doing random access, of course, and this applies pretty universally to most spinning rust media. Once you start with the random access, you're going to wish you were using an SSD.

The performance uplift you're going to gain from the increased spindle speed is minimal, and isn't useful outside of game / level loading and things like texture streaming (which should be seamless no matter the underlying media type.) The spindle speed isn't going to do anything whatsoever to your the frames per second your graphics card and CPU are producing, unless the game is garbage and somehow manages to be IO bound.

 

[hamada.hosny93]

The performance difference between a 7200 and 5400 RPM drive is hardly worth paying extra cost. Even the 5400 RPM Shingled Seagate drives can manage 150 - 190 MB/s throughput, and those are not known as high speed drives. Provided you're not doing random access, of course, and this applies pretty universally to most spinning rust media. Once you start with the random access, you're going to wish you were using an SSD.

The performance uplift you're going to gain from the increased spindle speed is minimal, and isn't useful outside of game / level loading and things like texture streaming (which should be seamless no matter the underlying media type.) The spindle speed isn't going to do anything whatsoever to your the frames per second your graphics card and CPU are producing, unless the game is garbage and somehow manages to be IO bound.

Thanks for your reply, well, I'm looking forward for gaming most of the time in that new pc, I just wanna make sure to have nice and smooth performance in gaming, anyways i need more storage for games since i didn't try any games since 2014 due to some busy working during the last years, that's why i wanna more storage because i'm going to try many games. well do you think that 5400 RPM 2TB HDD will affect gaming performance by any means?? should i go for it?

 

[bigpinkdragon286]

I wouldn't hesitate to use a 5400 RPM hard drive, but I also wouldn't use a spinning platter magnetic drive as the OS drive, unless I had zero other choices.

Even just a cheap 128 GB SSD for Windows will go a long way to making the whole system run in a fashion that just feels better.

For games that I insist on faster loading times, I install those to an SSD. For games that it doesn't matter for, use the hard drive. What you're going to find is, there are few games that absolutely require the speed an SSD will give you, and for those that don't, the speed difference between the 5400 - 7200 RPM drives (there's actually other speeds between, such as 5900 RPM as well) isn't going to matter. If your game doesn't play smoothly because you're running a 5400 RPM drive, it's still not going to play smoothly on a 7200 RPM drive.

If your games don't play smoothly, it's likely not going to be the fault of the hard drive.

Most games aren't bottlenecked by hard drive IO. You're planning to run 16 GB or RAM. This will pretty much eliminate paging in games. I really wouldn't worry about the spindle speed of your hard drive. The difference will likely need to be benchmarked, in each game, to be seen. Only an SSD is going to give you a noticeable improvement there.

 

[madmatt30]

No Toshiba or Seagate drives in your location ??

They are pretty much all 7200rpm , even 2tb+ models.

It's only WD who think it's fair to rebadge a green 5400rpm drive as a blue model above
1tb size.

 

[hamada.hosny93]

I wouldn't hesitate to use a 5400 RPM hard drive, but I also wouldn't use a spinning platter magnetic drive as the OS drive, unless I had zero other choices.

Even just a cheap 128 GB SSD for Windows will go a long way to making the whole system run in a fashion that just feels better.

For games that I insist on faster loading times, I install those to an SSD. For games that it doesn't matter for, use the hard drive. What you're going to find is, there are few games that absolutely require the speed an SSD will give you, and for those that don't, the speed difference between the 5400 - 7200 RPM drives (there's actually other speeds between, such as 5900 RPM as well) isn't going to matter. If your game doesn't play smoothly because you're running a 5400 RPM drive, it's still not going to play smoothly on a 7200 RPM drive.

If your games don't play smoothly, it's likely not going to be the fault of the hard drive.

Most games aren't bottlenecked by hard drive IO. You're planning to run 16 GB or RAM. This will pretty much eliminate paging in games. I really wouldn't worry about the spindle speed of your hard drive. The difference will likely need to be benchmarked, in each game, to be seen. Only an SSD is going to give you a noticeable improvement there.

Thanks for that info, but as i understand from your words, you only have a problem for running the OS in HDD whatever its 5400, 7200 RPM and you think its better to run it at SSD that will also give additional better performance to gaming ?
Well, I totally agree with you, but actually only 1 drive i can afford right now because of my restricted budget ... anyways based on my current budget and current build, do you think my gaming will be affected by any means if i get 5400RPM HDD WD blue 2TB?

 

[seagate_surfer]

Hello hamada.hosny93. Its great to know you finally have time to game. Wish I had some more free time to do so. As for your question, you could also look into our Hybrid FireCuda drives. The combine speed and storage as in what you are looking for. Don't know exactly what you budget is but they may fit within its range. Best of luck! Game on! and independently of what drive you choose, that you for considering Seagate.