Hard Drive Importance?

Ghostly Apparition on 4/5/2008 at 14:58

Quote Posted by Bikerdude

hmmm

Once you have experienced a raid array on your home computer, you would never say "Im not bothered about load times" ever again.

Most motherboards have raid support, I'm currently running 3x Hitachi Deskstar 7k80's which give me a throughput of up to 170mb/s, access times of less than 8ms and a windows load time of under/around 30sec (Xp/vista).

Games like T3, Oblivion, Stalker all benefit from running on a raid array, the load times are 2-3x faster.

If you need the lowdown on how to setup a raid array drop me a pm or we can chat about it in here.

biker

You don't need a raid array to have good load times. I bought a WD raptor 10,000 rpm HD a few years ago, and windows load times are still around 30 seconds. plus 3 years later I am still very happy with my computer overall.
A great processor, video card and all is great but if your HD is a bottleneck, you are still gonna feel like you're on an old computer.
If you're gonna build a new computer don't go halfway, get yourself a good Harddrive. You'll be glad you did.

catbarf on 6/5/2008 at 21:29

Quote Posted by Ghostly Apparition

Well, see, my question really boils down to: Will the hard drive affect anything but loading times? Because for me, loading times are absolutely meaningless. I can sit and wait for however long it takes. I bought a cheap one off Ebay to start, I'm going to get a better one in a few months, but I'm not convinced it's even necessary.

Ghostly Apparition on 6/5/2008 at 22:50

Quote Posted by catbarf

Well, you can sit and wait all day for something to load. but why would you want too?
I guess the bottom line for you would be, to at least buy a HD from a reputable company and possibly check reviews. Load times aren't everything, the last thing you want is after waiting all day for whatever to load to have your HD freezeup or just crap out on you. I have heard some horror stories about that.
In that case you lose everything you have on your computer.

catbarf on 7/5/2008 at 00:39

Quote Posted by Ghostly Apparition

Thanks for your patience in helping me. In the end, I just really have a hard time justifying $100 for a few minutes shaved off here and there. Still, I think I'll get a Raptor or somesuch, and use that for gaming while keeping the slower hard drive for massive quantities of data.

Ghostly Apparition on 7/5/2008 at 02:13

Quote Posted by catbarf

Yeah,I can sympathize with shelling out money for something not nearly as sexy as other computer parts( CPU, video card), but at the end of the day the Harddrive is the most important component there is. As that is where all your precious data resides.

jstnomega on 7/5/2008 at 14:35

Quote Posted by Bikerdude

BD, just curious: does a raid array serve to smooth out the jerkiness associated w/Morrowind cell loading/transitions? TIA.

Jetsetlemming on 7/5/2008 at 23:50

Quote Posted by catbarf

Load times, stability, extremely minor performance if it's REALLY, REALLY old and slow (most game engine in-game loading schemes are built with the standard hard drive in mind). That's about it. It's worth shelling out an extra $20 to get the hard drive size and type you want from a trustworthy brand name. No-name tech is a bad idea in most cases, an with hard drives doubly so, right up there with power supplies.

Mortal Monkey on 11/5/2008 at 10:34

Quote Posted by theBlackman

Of course, if a RAID array craps out on you you lose everything, unless you use a professional recovery company.

Not quite. RAID stands for "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks". RAID 0 is the only one wich cannot recover from a disk failure (although you are correct in that you will lose the entire array in that case).

With RAID 3/4/5, you get a boosted read performance and and a slightly lower write performance, and will not lose any data if one of the drives fail.

Ofcourse, since you need at least 3 disks for RAID 3/4/5, you might as well shell out for one extra and go for a RAID 0 + RAID 1 setup.