Is my hard drive causing my slow downs?

[nocturnal7x]

Ok, I only really have this issue in oblivion, haven't played fo3 yet. anyway, I recently got an antec twelve hundred so now I can hear my HDD because the case is so quiet. I notice that when my FPS drop my HDD makes noise as though its working very hard.

I have an old, about 4 year old seagate barracuda 7200.8 HDD. Just wondering if anyone thinks a cheap WD caviar black would make a difference worth the 80 or so dollars.


My current specs:
GA-P35-DS3L
EVGA 8800GT superclocked
e8400 @ 3.6ghz
2 gigs of ram

 

[jamesgoddard]

An extra GB of RAM may make more of a difference - system is only using HDD when there is not enough memory

 

[nocturnal7x]

An extra GB of RAM may make more of a difference - system is only using HDD when there is not enough memory

That makes sense, shows Im still a noob after a year of having this PC I built. I will give that a try... Just bought 2 more gigs, dirt cheap.

 

[dokk2]

keep in mind that when you have two or more g's of ram with xp you can get rid of the swapfile..

 

[alpinefr3ak]

I agree with dokk2, when your HD is chugging, it is probably writing to the page file on your HD.

Add the extra 2 GB's and turn off the page file