Be aware of some limitations of your 250GB drive:
1. 250GB is what the sales people call it. It actually has room for only 232 GB if actual files.
2. You want to keep 15% of that free so that it can handle garbage collection and maintain optimal performance; that gets you down to 197 Gb. Windows will take up < 50 GB the day you install it , but within 6 months it will 'grow' to 80GB or more depending on how astute you are in cleaning it out. That leaves just 117 GB.
3. I'll assume you have only 45 GB of program files and that leaves 72 Gb for games.... GTAV takes up 65 GB
In short, even at 250 GB of size, you won't have room for many games. Unless your ready to up that to 500 or 1000 GB, having afast HD will be important of that is where your games will be.
Yes, all things being equal, a 7200 rpm drive is 5% faster than a 5400 rm drive. As I am sure you are aware, the WD Black is WDs premium performance drive and is significantly faster than the Blue.
In THGs gaming benchmark the $115 WD Black comes in at 6.34 MB/s and costs. The 7200 rpm WD Blue is $74 and comes in at 4.01 MB/s here but expect the newer ? larger models to be a bit faster
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/hdd-charts-2013/-17-PCMark-7-Gaming,2915.html
http://pcpartpicker.com/part/western-digital-internal-hard-drive-wd2003fzex
http://pcpartpicker.com/part/western-digital-internal-hard-drive-wd20ezrz
OTOH, the Seagate SSHD comes in more than 50% faster (9.76 MB/s) than the WD Black and is only $14 more than the WD Blue
http://pcpartpicker.com/part/seagate-internal-hard-drive-st2000dx001
We have both desktops and laptops equipped with SSDs and SSHDs and, as of yet, no one has been able to tell (w/o running benchmarks) which one is which.
Booting of the SSD takes 15.6 seconds
Booting of the SSHD takes 16.5 seconds
You will get the greatest befit from a SSHD is you tend to play games sequentially and less so if you are going to say play 8 different games in one night. For example, when you are playing Far Cry 3 ... all your FC3 files will be moved to the SSD portion of the drive.... once you start playing FC4, the FC3 files will be moved from the SSD and replaced by the FC4 files... quietly in the background with out you needing to do anything.
http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/5748/seagate-desktop-2tb-sshd-st2000dx001-review/index9.html
A situation like this left most power users using an SSD for their operating system, while still running a secondary mechanical drive for storage and games. A typical setup such as this would allow the OS to load very quickly, while leaving you stunned at how long it took to load a game. With the introduction of the Desktop SSHD, Seagate has again switched up the game, offering a substantial performance boost to those of you in this situation.
Now, if you are one that chooses to use a single drive for your operating system, and have held onto your standard desktop HDD for the benefit of capacity, the Desktop SSHD is calling your name. The 8GB of NAND cache in conjunction with Seagate's application optimized algorithms should offer a tremendous performance boost, and again the more you use, it the faster the drive will get, as it learns how you use your system.
In every case seen here today, the Seagate Desktop SSHD excels, whether it be a synthetic point and click benchmark like HD Tune or ATTO, or even application traces via PCMark 8, the drive just performs.
SSDs have come down so far in price that it is often hard to say 'don't get one" except in really tight budgets where the choice is between adding an SSD and getting the next more powerful GFC card. In that situation, we recommend "SSHD + GFX card upgrade". But once ya get past that budget level, an SSD is almost an automatic. However, an SSD + SSHD puts a 50% performance increase on the games that do not fit on your SSD and a 50% performance increase for $14, I consider it the proverbial "no brainer".
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