Steam and Hard Drives

When ordering my new laptop i had a thought, I'm mainly going to be using steam to run my games and therefore going to be store my games on my hard drive which would require lots of space. but since the games were being run from the hard drive surely i would need a faster one to make sure i dont bottle neck the performance.

What are your opinions for a steam based gaming system?

I ordered a 320 gb 7200 rpm rather than a 500 gb 5400 rpm and im not really sure of the advantages.

SSD is out of the question btw way too expensive for too little storage space

Thanks for your opions

 

A hard drive is not going to affect or bottleneck your performance. At most, a faster hard drive will decrease load times, but that's about it. Gameplay will be dictated mainly by your GPU, then your CPU.

 

oh, just checking you know that PC games run from the hard drive and not the DVD/CD drive in 99% of cases don't you. Although the DVD drive is fast enough to install a game from, it is not fast enough to run a game from. Playing a game with the disk in the drive is just an old counter-piracy measure now days.

 

IMO, size is more important than speed--especially for the tiny drives used in laptops.

I'd rather have a 500GB 54000 drive than my current 320GB 7200rpm one.

FWIW, my Steam account has around 110 games.

 

I'm sorry, but I can't get past the image of Mad Max building a gaming rig chalk full of sprockets.

Seriously though, it matters little: since all important game data is cached to memory, the only times you'll notice a difference is during load times (which will occur regardless of where you store the games) and even that it will be small at best.

That being said, I'd rather have my 7200 320GB than a 5400 500GB. Contrary to what some may think, a user from these forums have done tests showing the 5400 runs hotter and louder (Seagate's anyways).

 

All much the same, more down to price and personal preference. I have a 500GB 5400 and only really use steam game's and it's great.

 

Yea try for the highest capacity, even if it is slower, the higher the data density, the better the transfer rates, high capacity laptop drives that have a 5400rpm speed usually perform about the same as the lower capacity ones that are quicker.

And as the others said, only load times will be affected, there will be no performance gains.

 

I run my Steam games (and lots of others) from an even slower USB drive (Western Digital 500GB 5400 rpm)...my external and internal drives are identical, but internal has a SATA interface with the data bus while the external has to move data through USB 2.0...

And I believe that my HDDs' spec sheet showed approx. 100 MB/s to and from the disc (which, if I remember right, one upper-case B equals eight lower-case b's...so that's 800 Mb/s)

USB 2.0 limits that to 480 Mb/s. Whereas, the internal SATA bus allow the HDD to operate at max through-put with 3 Gb/s information bandwidth...

The USB 2.0 bottlenecks me, and Steam games still play fine...my Steam installation used to be on my internal drive, but Steam directory grew too large with the weekend sales...and I don't remember noticing a difference between going from internal to external (SATA to USB 2.0) so I doubt that the rotational speed will make a huge difference for gaming...

As was mentioned, heat and noise (and capacity trumps them all...I'm a packrat) become the more pressing issue (for me)...usually, heat and noise go up with the faster drives, but apparently, in at least one case reported here, that's not true...in my old laptop, going from a 4200 rpm drive (original design) to a 5400 rpm drive severely challenged the laptop's cooling system...

 

no...ps3 and 360 use blu-ray/dual layer DVD, respectively and run games fine. DVD drives are more than capable, it is just that HDD are "usually" faster in loading, unless you are using some 4200RPM PATA one or something....

 

Except that the PS3 doesn't really. The Bluray drive in the PS3 is not fast enough (2x? 4x?) to run all games reliably, that's why you get the dreaded "installing" phase for some games.

 

well...thats cuz its bluray or something. xbox runs fine, the only game that i can think of that runs poorly on discs...is nothing, for the 360 at least. its actually the opposite for consoles cuz games like GTA and Halo are poorly optimized for HDD cache read so they run with texture pop-ins and what-not. o well, at least GoW2 is installed fine on my 360.

 

While true that 360 and PS3 can run games from DVDs or Blu-Rays but...
ever wonder why console games have all these load screens between levels?

PC FTW