[SOLVED] What is there to look for when purchasing HardDrives?

[Zachary A.]

Which ones are the most zippy in both reading and writing? SATA1, 2 or 3? and how much does 5400rpm and 7200rpm differ in performance?

 

[USAFRet]

For spinning hard drives, SATA I/II/III doesn't really matter. They can barely saturate a SATA I connection throughput.

5400 vs 7200? Generally the 7200 RPM will be "faster" in raw throughput and access time.

Also, what you use it for impacts. A 2 hour movie still takes 2 hours to watch.

 

[Zachary A.]

For spinning hard drives, SATA I/II/III doesn't really matter. They can barely saturate a SATA I connection throughput.

5400 vs 7200? Generally the 7200 RPM will be "faster" in raw throughput and access time.

Also, what you use it for impacts. A 2 hour movie still takes 2 hours to watch.

let's say I'd want to play some casual games like csgo, out of all the various types of hard drives, which one tends to load a map the fastest?

and why doesn't sata1,2 or 3 matter? I've heard that sata 1 has a bandwidth throughput of 1.5Gb/s, whereas a sata3 has around 6Gb/s. Wouldn't this help in lets say, booting up into desktop or loading into a game map faster?

 

[USAFRet]

SATA I/II/III doesn't matter, because the drive itself can't serve up fast enough to run out of throughput on the port.
You could have a SATA IX connection capable of eleventy billion GBs, and the HDD is still doing its slow thing.

For games, you'd want a performance oriented drive. Like a WD Black.
Or, a solid state drive.