[SOLVED] Should I get rid of my 5400rpm HDD?

[ProPlayerGR]

Hello everyone. Right now I have an fx 9370, a gtx 1070 and I have a 5400rpm WD HDD and the loading times are frustrating long in some games. I bought a ryzen 5 2600 and 16gb 3000mhz ram, will the loading times improve or should I buy a 7200rpm HDD? Btw I have windows 10 installed on my Sandisk Ultra II 240GB. So will the loading times improve or should I just buy a new hdd? Thanks in advance.

 

[anotherdrew]

I hate to give you and "it depends" answer, but ... it depends. With a lot of games, the majority of loading time is moving art (textures) and maps from your hard disk to your memory so they can quickly be accessed. If this is the case on a specific game, then you will see your hard drive light (assuming you have one) blink furiously. In these cases a faster hard drive will help. Though, moving from 5400rpm to a 7200rpm will provide a minor improvement. Moving to an SSD will make a noticeable improvement ... even if it is a older, slower (cheaper) SSD.

If your loading time is slow becuase of other things (online file check, for example), then a faster hard drive will have minimal effect on loading time.

 

[ProPlayerGR]

I hate to give you and "it depends" answer, but ... it depends. With a lot of games, the majority of loading time is moving art (textures) and maps from your hard disk to your memory so they can quickly be accessed. If this is the case on a specific game, then you will see your hard drive light (assuming you have one) blink furiously. In these cases a faster hard drive will help. Though, moving from 5400rpm to a 7200rpm will provide a minor improvement. Moving to an SSD will make a noticeable improvement ... even if it is a older, slower (cheaper) SSD.

If your loading time is slow becuase of other things (online file check, for example), then a faster hard drive will have minimal effect on loading time.

Yeah but with the new cpu the loading times will be better right?

 

[anotherdrew]

Yeah but with the new cpu the loading times will be better right?

A new CPU can't make your hard drive go faster. If the hard drive is what's holding you back (often referred to as a bottleneck) then the new CPU will not help much.

Easy test ... pull up your task manager and watch performance as something loads (a 2nd monitor sometimes helps with this). If your disk 1 (I assume that is where your games are) is at 90%+ usage and CPU is at 10-20%, then a new CPU won't change much for that task ... Now if you have a task (like playing a game) where you CPU is 90%+ and your hard drive is at 10-20%, then a new CPU will help, but a new hard drive won't.

 

[DigDeep]

Actually 5400rpm vs 7200rpm means nothing, if HD is not good. I have new Seagate Barracuda 7200rpm 2tb 256mb cache and while benchmarks are great, real world scenario sucks, copying drops to crawling 20MBs. I would be hapier if I bought 5400rpm WD Blue, I just know they are better, because even my old 512gb WD Green 5400rpm is faster than 2tb 7200rpm 256mb cache Seagate Barracuda. Everyone is looking at benchmarks, but people should look at copying file performance. I dont know what to do with this drive, I wanted to claim warranty, but I think disk would perform the same, I made a mistake and should have bought 2tb WD Blue EZRZ, but on paper Seagate looks better, thas why I went with Seagate.