New hardrive affecting games

I am going to be buying a Western Digital Raptor 36 gig 10000 rpm 8meg cache
SATA hardrive for the sole purpose of having my PC games load faster and run
smoother. The only question i have is would it be better to install my OS on
this hardrive and have my games on my 120 gig IDE slower hardrive. Or would
it be better to have my OS on my 120 gig and use the WD fast hardrive ONLY
for games. Remember that I just want betetr quality in games. So im guessing
installing all the games on my new one is the best choice. Im looking for
opinions thnx

On Sun, 27 Jun 2004 04:30:45 GMT, "Chris"
wrote:

I am going to be buying a Western Digital Raptor 36 gig 10000 rpm 8meg cache
SATA hardrive for the sole purpose of having my PC games load faster and run
smoother. The only question i have is would it be better to install my OS on
this hardrive and have my games on my 120 gig IDE slower hardrive. Or would
it be better to have my OS on my 120 gig and use the WD fast hardrive ONLY
for games. Remember that I just want betetr quality in games. So im guessing
installing all the games on my new one is the best choice. Im looking for
opinions thnx

Have the best of both worlds, partition the drive 10/25 [ish] :

1. Raptor partition 0 = O/S & apps
2. Raptor partition 1 = Games
3. 120 GiG = Archive / music / & the virgin image of your new O/S !

Remember 1GiG of memory will dramatically reduce the use of the
swapfile in newer bigger games.

BoroLad

Would be interested in hearing your results. My friend recently went a
somewhat similar route on an Athlon 64 3000+ system that has a gig of
DDR400. He had been using a 3 year old 40GB 2mb cache (7200rpm) ATA100
(IBM I believe) that was noisy so he replaced it with the 36GB Raptor
10k rpm (running XP & NTFS) - only HDD in system. I don't know the
details on his partitioning.

He says he has not noticed any difference in loading times of games
themselves nor individual map loadups in what he's playing, i.e., Call
of Duty, UT 2003 and 2004, and FarCry. Benchmarks haven't changed at
all. He was not experiencing swapping or hitching in any games anyway -
although he did have this occuring before he doubled his RAM (from 512mb
to 1 Gig). We weren't expecting anything huge anywhere, but we expected
something somewhere(!) and it's been virtually impossible to notice.

I know he had done some serious timed-testing before and after because
we had debated the possible improvements quite a bit before he got the
new drive - i.e., SATA 150 vs ATA 100 and the 8mb cache vs 2mb, not to
mention 10k vs 7200rpm etc., because he saw this as a potential nice
overall system boost. On his system though it just hasn't shown much -
at least not what he was after. (It's quieter - but actually not much!).
Would like to hear what happens with yours.

On Sun, 27 Jun 2004 05:41:58 -0500, ranger
wrote:

Would be interested in hearing your results. My friend recently went a
somewhat similar route on an Athlon 64 3000+ system that has a gig of
DDR400. He had been using a 3 year old 40GB 2mb cache (7200rpm) ATA100
(IBM I believe) that was noisy so he replaced it with the 36GB Raptor
10k rpm (running XP & NTFS) - only HDD in system. I don't know the
details on his partitioning.

He says he has not noticed any difference in loading times of games
themselves nor individual map loadups in what he's playing, i.e., Call
of Duty, UT 2003 and 2004, and FarCry. Benchmarks haven't changed at
all. He was not experiencing swapping or hitching in any games anyway -
although he did have this occuring before he doubled his RAM (from 512mb
to 1 Gig). We weren't expecting anything huge anywhere, but we expected
something somewhere(!) and it's been virtually impossible to notice.

I know he had done some serious timed-testing before and after because
we had debated the possible improvements quite a bit before he got the
new drive - i.e., SATA 150 vs ATA 100 and the 8mb cache vs 2mb, not to
mention 10k vs 7200rpm etc., because he saw this as a potential nice
overall system boost. On his system though it just hasn't shown much -
at least not what he was after. (It's quieter - but actually not much!).
Would like to hear what happens with yours.



it's not because it say sata that it would be nessecery faster, yes
your write but not mutch. your old hard drive did probably read at
write 48mb/s

if i take a sata samsung spint point 120gig it read at 47.8mb/s that
is a 7200rpm disk (sp1213c)

and even if i buy a swestern digital raptor disk that turn at 10000
rpm sata 37gig it will read at 49.7mb/s

if you want improuvement go buy your self a 250gig disk an ata
7200 maxtor dimond max 9 disk (2m) tm 8 mb of cash then to make it a
little bit slower.

and the fastess disk i've seen i a
15k seagate cheeta scsi 73gigs drive that read at 66.6mb/s
st373307lw

at leass i got a disk with fluide ball biring :-)

What video card you got? get an X800 XT if you want games to run smoother.

"Chris" wrote in message
rs.com...
I am going to be buying a Western Digital Raptor 36 gig 10000 rpm 8meg
cache
SATA hardrive for the sole purpose of having my PC games load faster and
run
smoother. The only question i have is would it be better to install my OS
on
this hardrive and have my games on my 120 gig IDE slower hardrive. Or
would
it be better to have my OS on my 120 gig and use the WD fast hardrive ONLY
for games. Remember that I just want betetr quality in games. So im
guessing
installing all the games on my new one is the best choice. Im looking for
opinions thnx