Difference Between Hard Drive Speeds?

Okay, so here is my question... It's regarding gaming and/or video editing, picture editing, etc.

I am curious as to how different speeds of HDD's can really affect performance. Not so much as to how it works, but is there really a big difference?

For example, if I were to play Crysis on a 7200 RPM drive and then a 15k RPM drive, would I really notice much of a difference?

My main reason for asking this question is that if you go to build a custom gaming machine(One that you say what you want and the company builds it/sends it to you) their default for high-end gaming systems is almost always like a 1 GB 7200 RPM drive, rather than a 150GB 15k RPM drive or something. Why is this? They always choose the highest-end stuff for the other components, so that makes me feel that there really is no difference between 7200/15k, or maybe even 5400 - 15k.

Can anyone please shed some light on this?

Thanks in advance.

actually no much different if we playing game even high end game because high end will use graphic processor and CPU mostly. And game rarely access, write or read harddisk. so no affect gaming perfomance.

It makes a big difference when reading and writing files, especially large numbers of small files that require information to be read from places all over the disk. For example, having a 10k or 15k drive can make a big difference to boot speeds compared to using a 7200 drive. The same applies in games when loading levels or whatever. These generally require loading a large number of files, and therefore a faster disk can make a large difference.

As rvalkass said, it allows for faster transferring and access of files that are pretty (or immensely) big. But in practice, unless you work for a media company, where HD videos with pretty big resolutions and similar, or if you download things illegally (since this is the main cause for mass memory income, which i am against, of course), then you won't really need more than 7,200 RPM. Concerning games, the game will almost always load (i.e. if there are any exceptions) the map before allowing you to play, so the speed is somewhat irrelevant, unless you are impatient, not wanting to wait a mere extra 2 (more or less) seconds compared to faster hard drives.

Well I was thinking about games that load up levels as you go along, such as (and I hate the game) Age of Conan. But pretty much what you guys are concluding is that the games and stuff load completely into ram, rather than being read as you go along? Sorry about my ignorance on this, I've just never really paid attention. I always assumed that 10/15k rpm drives were best, .

I am going to assume that 10/15k rpm drives also run hotter/louder as well, correct?

I guess overall I really do not need a need for one. But then what about 5400 > 7200 RPM? Like laptops generally use 5400. Is this really the same thing, because I've noticed that usually those laptops run significantly slower than the ones with 7200 PM(but that could also be because obviously the one with the more expensive driver is going to be higher-end)


Thanks again for your input, guys!

This post has been edited by rpgsearcherz: Dec 28 2008, 03:26 PM

Ok.. Just first some background information on this subject.

a 5,400 to 10000 RPM Hard drive will have aground 1 gbit/s transfer rate. If you get a 10,000 to 15k RPM hard drive, it has up to 1.6gbit/s transfer rates. The makers of these faster hard drives have to also shrink the disk size that the actual data from the computer is stored, to reduce air drag and to be able to achieve these high revolutions per minute. There is a noticeable difference when you are using a 5.4k RPM hard drive from a 7.2k RPM hard drive. Our house has a mix of new and old computers, meaning some of them are 5.4, and some are 7.2. When i backup, or transfer data i can see a noticeable speed difference between the different computers i transfer with.

When high end computers, and gaming come in, most gaming enthusiasts love to get faster hard drives, so they can load, play, and save their games faster. The only downside to a fast hard drive is that the hard drive size is lower, since they have to use a smaller disk to reduce air drag, which ends in high end users running multiple really fast drives in a RAID format. When it comes to noise, your planning on creating a gaming system, well it won't be a gaming system if you can't hear all the fans running, so the hard drive noise shouldn't matter, but it really doesn't generate a lot of noise. Since it spins faster, it creates more friction, causing high heat levels, but again, if you are running a high end gaming system, your most likely going to have a fan on or by your hard drive(s). These faster hard drives also use more electricity which also means if you are running multiple, you would need a power supply with more watts.


Have any questions? i hope that helped explain.

Generally a large 10k or 15k drive is more susceptible to failure than a same size 7200 rpm drive , that is why major gaming systems come with 7200 rpm.

I believe its bcoz they tend to generate higher temperatures and since when you are gaming it requires lot of read and write (swap, levels etc) and if someone is a hardcore gamer or is trying to be one, he might end up 15-16 hrs a day and that is ought to bring down the hard-disk

Hence generally 7200 rpm drives are used. 15k rpm is generally required for faster boot times as explained by rvalkass and truefusion

You wont experience any difference in the gameplay, except only faster loading times. To be honest , you can even neglect that it takes less than 30 sec to load level for crysis warhead on my system (7200 rpm seagate)



and one more thing 15k drives are NEVER used to keep data backups only 5400 rpm drives are used for that. Don't know the reason but have seen it in many of the companies
may be its the cost factor but I doubt since they are using Workstations , so definitely they can afford 15k drives

Well, RAM will always be quicker to access than a hard drive. The 10k+ RPM hard drives can be useful for faster SWAP. If one is using a computer with a low amount of RAM where they are constantly low on RAM, these faster hard drives would be quite helpful. But, again, unless you're placing really big files into memory (e.g. 2gig. file), or just constantly moving them around, or constantly making back-ups of entire systems, then it will most likely not matter if your hard drive is 7,200 RPM. Let's say the 7,200 RPM hard drive transfers at 1.0gbits a second, and we're trying to transfer a one gigabyte file. That would take about 8 seconds to fully transfer the file to a location that can receive at the same speed. But once the file is in memory, access to it will be a whole lot quicker if the operating system has good memory management, like Linux.

Okay, so then, the 15k RPM drives would be better for things like gaming servers? Not like UT2k4 gaming or anything, but let's assume that you were running a private server for a MMORPG(for the sake of this, let's assume that it's one you made yourself). Would those be good for databases? Because of the higher write speed, I'd guess it would be better, but with the higher fail rate...?

So far I'm pretty much coming up with a conclusion that 15k drives, and even possibly 10k drives, really do not have their place in the market yet.

@truefusion:

You brought up how they can be used for people who have low ram, but if I was tossing down $400 on a drive that holds less than a $50 7200 RPM drive, I could afford the ram, .


@ Tramposch

If I were to build a gaming system I would go with liquid cooling. Much more efficient than with fans, .

When people say higher fail rate, they are making it sounds like your computer is going to crash every day. It is not actually like that. When they say higher fail rate, I guess its more like every time 1 slower hard drive fails, a faster one fails. Have you had any hard drives fail recently? i would guess not, because they usually only fail if they are faulty, don't have enough power, or they are old.

The running it on a server also depends on the server, because i mean if your are running a fully blown WoW server, then a faster drive would be almost necessary seeing there would be so many people doing quests, leveling, saving, chatting, and things like that, but if your just running like a runescape private server then it would not need to be so fast, hardly at all.

Also, water cool does make noise, but substantially less than just having fans cool everything. You still have one or two (some times more) fans included in water cooling. The way it works (assuming that you don't know) coolant is pumped through the tubes to the pieces of equipment, such as the CPU, and the heat from the CPU is conducted by the coolant (is conducted the right word), and then the warm coolant flows to a radiator, where a fan cools the coolant down, and it gets pumped through the system again. The radiator usually has one or two fans. If this is your first build also, im guessing that you have never taken off a fan on a video card, and put on a water block, and if you didn't know how to do that, your video card(s) would have fans on them, generating noise. (You can buy video cards with water blocks already mounted, but they are more expensive). So over all you will also still have some noise from fans. I am also thinking, if this is your first build, you are most likely not going to water cool your north bridge ( i think that is the part that should be cooled) so you might even have two more fans, an intake and an outake, which generates more noise.

So it really depends on what you plan to do with the hard drives that will distinguish which speed you need.