When does a game interact with the HDD?

I know installation writes data to the HDD. Are the game and HDD constantly interacting during normal gameplay? Or does the game interact with the RAM until the user exits the game (at which point in time the RAM sends all necessary data to the HDD)?

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When does a game interact with the HDD?

when it is loading. you can actually hear when it interacts with the hard drive just by listening to the small clicking sounds made and your hard drive LED lighting up. this is it loading the data from the hard drive into the RAM. if youre wondering about performance in games, then unless you have one of those older games that load while youre playing, you wont see any improvement in gaming performance. however, people still like to have faster hard drives because the hard drive is the slowest part of the computer, and people dont like waiting for their hard drives. its not as slow as i seem to be making it out, but some people still prefer a faster loading speed.

Thanks, hiigaran. I have one more question: what specifications of a HDD are most important for a gaming desktop? Capacity, RPM, or cache?

RPM doesn't really matter anymore.

Many of the newer 7200RPM drives keep up with the 10K RPM drives.

I'd say size because you can store more stuff.

Thanks a lot for the reply. Unfortunately, now I'm interested in how slower rotating drives can keep up with faster rotating drives. If you could explain that, then I would be very appreciative.

The 10KRPM drives are still faster.

But the performance difference is so small most people wont notice a difference.

Can anyone tell me what the RPM of this HDD is? I can't find it anywhere. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136365

Thanks.

of all that? can you link a specific product, not a massive list of them please? and the RPM is found in the name. 7200 RPM for example.

also, if you really need the performance, you can go for an SSD instead of a HDD. a solid state drive is a hard drive with no moving parts, so it is really fast. think of it as a giant USB flash drive with large transfer rates. however, theyre very expensive - a few hundred for 128 gigs. the popular ones are the 64 gig drives where people put their operating systems and most frequently used games.

Sorry for that. Apparently, newegg deactivated the hard drive I linked to a little after I linked to it.

Anyway, I have found a HDD I think is very good and then some. If someone could give me their opinion on it, then that should conclude this thread. http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/desktops/barracuda_hard_drives/barracuda_xt/#tTabContentSpecifications

I'm very thankful for the replies I've received so far. They have been extremely helpful. Thanks again.

thats a great drive, but how much is it? i think the cost would be the deal breaker. and would you really use 2 TB of space?

It costs about $300.

I'm not sure how fast I will fill up 2TB. I plan to produce playthroughs, which are video and sound for every second of gameplay. In addition to the games themselves, I'll need room for pictures and music.

alright, well you can do one of two things. you can get that drive, or, for the same amount of money (roughly), you can get this 10K 300 GB drive, and this standard 640 GB drive. you sacrifice 1 TB for higher performance on one of the drives.

alternatively, if you have the stomach to do some serious tweaking, you can get that 2 TB drive, and use one of the programs offered by seagate to short stroke the drive. what that means is that you limit the amount of space available, say, half of it, and by doing this, your data never goes to the inner portions of the hard drive, where it is much slower. this also has fragmentation benefits, but the whole tweaking if not for the faint hearted.

I'm not familiar with installing/using two hard drives but I'm willing if it's easy.

If I do go with the Seagate Barracuda XT, then will I notice the latency when it is writing/retrieving information to/from the inner portions of the drive without tweaking it?

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I'm not familiar with installing/using two hard drives but I'm willing if it's easy.

its easy. install the second hard drive just like the first.

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If I do go with the Seagate Barracuda XT, then will I notice the latency when it is writing/retrieving information to/from the inner portions of the drive without tweaking it?

ahh, its pretty similar to other drives i think, but im not too sure.