HDD 5400rpm for gaming?

[Silvio]

Hi everyone. I've recently bought a 3TB HDD with 5400rpm and as I said in the title, my question is, will it be good for gaming?
I already have a 1TB HDD with 7200rpm, but I have a lot of games to install (probably more than 1TB) and I would like to install all my games at once and all in the same HDD. So, if the performance loss is too high, then I think I'll install as many games as I can in the 7200rpm HDD, anyway.

What do you suggest? Is there any real difference between the two HDD for gaming?

Thanks for attention.

P.S. The OS (with every other program) is in a 120GB SSD.

[Kargor]

Depends. You should compare transfer rates, which SHOULD be documented somewhere.

Rotation speed isn't everything. Transfer rate is determined by two factors -- how fast does the disk rotate, and how much data is in one track. Chances are that the 3TB disk has more data per track than the 1TB disk, which means it reads more data per rotation, which works towards compensating the slower rotation speed. It can even make the 5400rpm disk FASTER than the 7200rpm one.

For certain scenarios rotation speed is king, though. If you keep reading small data packets, the "amount of data per track" becomes less important; instead, the fact that you'll need half a rotation on average until the data you want can be read becomes a factor. However, even that might be dwarfed by the fact that you actually need to MOVE to the correct track first...

So, as you can see, there is no easy way to determine which disk will be faster, unless you know exactly how data is being accessed.

For games, it probably doesn't matter at all -- they should read-ahead anyway, and at the beginning of a level when data is loaded, speed doesn't really matter.

[Silvio]

Thanks for replying! Is there any "easy" way to see if the 5400 reads more data per rotation than the 7200?

[Pomelo]

Well, the slower your drive, the longer your load times will be. So far, your game performance (as in, framerate) won't be influenced by drive speed, at least if it
s at least 5400rpm.
At least the slowest HDDs I had in the past years was 5400rpm and framerate was not influenced, and by now I have 7200rpm HDDs and SSDs and no matter where I put my games, the only thing that's faster is load times.

Well there's drive benchmarking tools that will measure the "overall" data rates of your drive with certain file/block sizes, which is already a good indication. And I mean, mapping that to "per rotation" would just be a matter of dividing the data rate per second by the rotation per second.

[UberFiend]

If you have enough memory to load the whole game into drive speed won't really be a factor.

Small difference in something like multiplayer battlfield where each map has to load between rounds.

[Silvio]

Thank you, Powl, for the advice! I already know the only actual difference would be the loading time through areas, but, is it that much? Can you make a comparison?

UberFiend, are you talking about RAM?

[Air]

Originally posted by Powl:

Well, the slower your drive, the longer your load times will be. So far, your game performance (as in, framerate) won't be influenced by drive speed, at least if it
s at least 5400rpm.
At least the slowest HDDs I had in the past years was 5400rpm and framerate was not influenced, and by now I have 7200rpm HDDs and SSDs and no matter where I put my games, the only thing that's faster is load times.

Well, there are some games that benefit from drive speed in terms of performance. Not many, though. Although an extremely slow drive(say you have one that's 10 years old and still somehow working) would definitely cause performance issues.

Originally posted by UberFiend:

If you have enough memory to load the whole game into drive speed won't really be a factor.

It doesn't work like that...

[Pomelo]

Originally posted by Sciarry:

Thank you, Powl, for the advice! I already know the only actual difference would be the loading time through areas, but, is it that much? Can you make a comparison?

UberFiend, are you talking about RAM?

Well the difference HDD vs SSD can be actual minutes if we're talking about a game with larger levels and/or detailed visuals. For example BF4 on a 5400rpm HDD might take a few minutes to load a vanilla map while an SSD might load it in a few dozen seconds.

[Silvio]

So, I've done the benchmark of both... What do you think?
http://www.imagestime.com/show.php/962263_Immagine2.jpg.html

The one on top is the 5400, the one on the bottom the 7200.

[rotNdude]

You already bought the drive, so try it and see.

[Pomelo]

Well, your 5400rpm appears to have better data rates than your 7200rpm drive...

[rotNdude]

Originally posted by Powl:

Well, your 5400rpm appears to have better data rates than your 7200rpm drive...

The 5400RPM drive probably doesn't have anything on it yet.

[_I_]

ofc, the wd drive will be faster than a hitachi

the wd looks to be the os drive, which wll cause more spikes in the test

hdtune tests read rates and seek times for sectors on the drive, doesnt need data or to be formatted for it to test

[Silvio]

As rotNdude said, the 5400 is totally empty. Almost the opposite for the 7200. I forgot to mention... Does it matter that much?

[rotNdude]

Originally posted by Sciarry:

As rotNdude said, the 5400 is totally empty. Almost the opposite for the 7200. I forgot to mention... Does it matter that much?

Of course it does very much.

[Silvio]

So, I've deleted almost 500GB of files from the Hitachi (it is more than half empty, now) and it is the same as before. I've redone the test but nothing changed! I guess the 5400 could actually be better than the 7200...