Laptop Hard Drive Spec Confusion.

If u dont fancy reading all of the post, i made this short bit.
Will, and how much, increased seek time help game performance?
Whats up with this Interface speed compatibitly stuff?

What im looking for is a fast performance hard drive for my Alienware m9750, as mine (st9120822as) struggles to run modern games, mostly the cut scenes, as its a bit sick.

I'v been researching, but the more i look the more confusing it gets. So was looking for someone who knows their stuff.

all i'v worked out is that the important bits for hard drive performance are:
RPM
Seek Time
Latency

I looked up the difference between 7200 and 5400, and, after many mixed reviews, decided to just go with 7200 to save hasle lol.


A few bits have me puzzled though.

First is about seek time. the only thing i'v worked out about it, is that it speeds up copying of many small folders. but i think im missing out on alot of info
My current drive's seek time is about 13ms. Will getting a drive with 8ms seek time help with games and desk top stuff?

Second bit is about interface speed. I read that u need to match the hard drive's Interface speed to ur computers.
When i bought my laptop, i had the option of having a faster one. So dont know if i can run both 1.5Gb/s and 3Gb/s.
Also i found u can get interface card to get them to work, but dont know if this is for laptops.
I didn't get the faster one then cos it was getting expensive lol.

Could you shead some light on these bits for me? I'v spent 2 days looking around, but only found more specs i need to consider.

 

Faster hard drives will not improve gaming performance by any noticeable amount except for maybe loading times.

The difference between 7200rpm and 5400rpm in gaming is almost nonexistent. Even with SSDs, I doubt that you can see much improvement gaming wise.

 

Interface doesn't matter with any current HDD since they don't even come close to saturating SATA/150. SSDs, on the other hand, can easily saturate SATA/150, so you want SATA/300 capable drive and compatible motherboard.

 

So what about Seek Time?
Other than copying many little files, would i see any improvment in other areas? like boot time, laster app load times?

 

Seek time btw HDDs isn't substantial since the difference isn't much. Most HDDs have seek times btw 10-20ms. Compare this to a SSD w/ 0.01-0.1ms, you will see a massive difference (orders of magnitude faster).

 

so i can just get a £20 HDD and performance will only be like 5% slower than a £300 HDD? (for laptop ofc)

 

Yes, the performance difference between the best and worst HDDs isn't much, though I doubt it will be that expensive. If you really want performance and a HDD won't cut it, then you have to be willing to pay for the performance in the form of a SSD.

 

hummm, will prob just get a cheapy till the price of SSD goes down. was £250 for a 128GB last time i cheaked.

Thanks for all the help guys. much appreciated.