Performance Impact of a 7200 RPM IDE HDD (Gaming)

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I have a 320GB 7200 RPM IDE(PATA) Hard Drive being offered to me for free. What would this do to my gaming performance versus a SATA hard drive. I know it should only affect my loading times, but how much should it affect them? I'm asking because I've only used IDE drives in old linux boxes and the like.

It will be a nice increase over a SATA drive and nothing to turn down for free. But I doubt that you'll see a huge change. Hard drive is seldom the choke point for any system. RAM, GPU, Processor, those are the choke points 90% of the time. That being said though, you would see quite a difference if the hard drive you installed was a (much more expensive) 10,000 RPM IDE. But you would have to have the RAM to keep up with that bad boy.

I thought that IDE was slower than SATA.

I guess it may depend on your system, I've gotten better performance, but then again, when I changed hard drives I obviously changed all the software on it as well. But the point still stands that it's seldom going to make a difference unless it's an RPM change.

OK, good. I just looked it up in an old thread on Tom's Hardware, and they've said that it won't make much difference as long as the cable isn't shared, an the drive is not one of the new 10,000 RPM drives. The reason I am going to use this drive as a primary drive in a new computer that I'm planning to build is I will be able to afford a better video card (Radeon 5770 1GB instead of 5650 512MB). Thanks.

Wow. People still care about things like RPMs on HDDs?

The HDD is about the slowest main component a PC accesses, and frankly, now that we have SATA interfaces with 3.0 GB/sec transfer rates, the RPMs are really a minor issue in performance. You should have enough RAM that the HDD is not a major component in a program's runtime.

Maybe I'm just not knowledgeable enough about this stuff, but I remember when RPMs were a big deal. Then they just made faster data interfaces for the HDD. After that the performance increase between otherwise identical drives for the faster RPM really didn't justify the higher price unless you used the PC in an application with very heavy HDD data read/write.

zer0netgain: You should really read the original post. His drive does not use a new interface.

Regarding that post... 7200 is a good speed and you shouldn't have much problems. The potential problem makers in this area are games that load data while displaying realtime content, such as the 3 latest Call of Duty titles, Gears of War, and some others. But IDE 7200 should be good enough.

Thanks. You have saved me $50.

Ah. Still, IDE vs. SATA is night and day. I don't think the data transfer rates between the best IDE and a basic SATA even comes close.

Still, should one complain if you get a decent drive for free?

Free = Good.

But performance wise, dont expect miracles.


If you want performance, go for a SSD (Solid State Disk), they consist purely out of memory circuits and can even be dropped on the floor without breaking. The 64 GB models are just starting to come down in price and are finally in reach of normal, non elite-consumers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive

IDE is clearly slower than SATA, if you can even find any HW that still supports it.

The point with a 3.0 GBps transfer rate is that the transfer rate outstrips the speed of the drive by a wide margin, so the physical drive becomes the bottleneck. In other words, the inverse of "the RPMs are really a minor issue". With solid state drive prices being what they currently are, for most common uses it probably only makes sense to buy a solid state drive these days. You WILL notice the difference, because this is one of the (if not the) primary bottlenecks in your system - this is a sledgehammer compared to all the screwdriver level improvements you can make. For media storage or anything you can't fit on your SSD, buy a big slow mechanical SATA drive.

Also, ignore RPMs. Look at sustained and burst transfer rates. A current 5400 RPM SATA drive will crap all over a 10kRPM SCSI drive from ten years ago.

I went with the used drive, making sure the motherboard that I'm using will work. Why would I be able to afford a SATA drive AND an SSD if I can barely afford a SATA drive?

Prices are from newegg.com:

Sorry, I neglected to notice you're 13.

Consider this for informational purposes

7200rpm is pretty standard for desktop drives. When the rpm is the same, what determine the performance is the areal density. I think IDE drive top out at about 160GB/3.5" platter. The SATA drives you find now have around 300-500GB/3.5" platter. The difference is so large that even a 5400rpm modern SATA drive will be faster than a 7200prm IDE drive.

The thread you saw on Tom's may be very old. The interface speed between IDE and SATA 1.5Gbps is quite similar, but the newer SATA 3Gbps doubled that and SATA 6Gbps doubled that again. Modern mechanical drive can deliver more than 100MB/s even at the end of the disk, so the IDE interface will definitely hold back the performance.

If you already have a SATA drive, I think it's better to keep it as the boot drive and use the IDE drive as swap or to store data. If you are deciding whether to buy a new drive, then I say just use the IDE drive. The performance gain from a new drive won't be night and day anyway.

Its what like about WP. Kids that talk like adults. nodice1996, I never noticed you were 13 either. Good job on being a sophisticated, well spoken teen.