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HDD Recomendations
Can anyone recomend a hard drive with a high data rate that isnt a SSD for around £100-200. I tend to install a lot of games and programs so using the SSD for the OS/Programs and another drive for storage wouldnt really offer any benefit (considering games are 8-20GB now). I was thinking of going for a 300GB Western Digital VelociRaptor (twice the space of SSDs for the same price) and using a larger, cheaper drive for storage and then fitting 8GB of RAM for less calls to the HDD in the first place. I can buy the RAM + SSD for less than a 300GB SSD.
Are there any better priced drives or larger drives than the VelociRaptor that can offer better value for money? I do know SSDs are as good as they get but with the new AMD 7000 coming soon budgeting for a GPU is eating into the budget.
Currently playing:
EVE online (Ruining low sec one hotdrop at a time)
Gravity Rush,
Dishonoured: The Knife of Dunwall.
(Waiting for) Metro: Last Light,
Company of Heroes II.
Comments
There is no such thing. Look how the VelociRaptor compares to a bunch of older SSDs that are mostly obsolete by now:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3681/oczs-vertex-2-special-sauce-sf1200-reviewed/6
Note that I said "high data rate" not "data rate as high as SSDs" because its obvious no HDD can match them, I am merely after a high data rate hard drive.
Currently playing:
EVE online (Ruining low sec one hotdrop at a time)
Gravity Rush,
Dishonoured: The Knife of Dunwall.
(Waiting for) Metro: Last Light,
Company of Heroes II.
This is a page from a HDD review from 2 years ago. A velocipartor is over priced for what it does and how much it can store.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/2tb-hdd-7200,2430-9.html
This is probably the important bit for you about the review though.
If you're going to pay enough for an SSD, then get an SSD. Compare prices, even:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820233160
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227726
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136802
If you can only afford $100 in total for storage, then get a WD Caviar Black.
SSDs are just way to costly, at least £400 for the minimum size I want. My Steam folder would more than fill up those 120-160GB Drives. I might be wrong but how much perfomance gain would it give me in games anyway? If theres enough RAM to not require hard disk calls and enough GPU memory so its not constantly reloading textures and so on wouldnt an SSD just decrease load times? If thats the case why waste money on one that will be better spent elsewhere, most articles seem to hint at that.
@Grunty
Thanks for that benchmark, looking at that I will probably pick up a 2TB WD Caviar Black. It costs the same as the VelociRaptor and larger storage HD combined.
Currently playing:
EVE online (Ruining low sec one hotdrop at a time)
Gravity Rush,
Dishonoured: The Knife of Dunwall.
(Waiting for) Metro: Last Light,
Company of Heroes II.
Really VelociRaptor won't give you much (if anything) in games over any decent 7200 rpm HDD.
SSD - in most games it won't give you much or just plain nothing apart of faster save/load and loading new game parts.
It gives best results in games that need to read alot of small bits of data from hdd while playing, like mmorpg's.
It gives great boost when f.e. going into crowded areas in mmorpg's. Everything load / appear on a screen much faster.
Still SSD given their current price are not replacement fod hdd, rather like separate drive for OS + maybe few selected programmes / games. Rest on normal HD, well unless you really have alot of money.
There is a utility that automates the creation of HD Symlinks for Steam
( http://www.overclock.net/ssd/825342-moving-steam-games-onto-your-ssd.html )
Manual directions there, as well as a link to the utility - it's seamless to the Steam Library. It lets you split Steam games across multiple hard drives without playing havoc with Steam.
That said:
SSD's won't give you any more FPS, that is true.
The difference between an SSD and any regular hard drive (Raptor included) is stunning to say the least. The most dramatic difference is in your OS boot time. Game load/zone times are pretty startling as well. The key is random access time (HD's call this the Seek time, SSD's usually call it Random I/O Ops), not in the transfer time.
Most files are very small and there are literally hundreds upon thousands of files to read when opening your typical video game, so your hard drive never really gets up to it's best transfer speed (which only measures the data speed for a contiguous single large file that is larger than the cache size), it spends all it's time finding the next file to read. For each file requested, you start in the seek time (or random I/O time), then add in the file size multiplied by the data transfer speed; not accounting for things like cache hits and the like, but that's the basic idea.
A typical hard drive seek time is around 10ms, a typical SSD random I/O time is around 0.01ms. SSD's are so fast, they stopped measuring the time per file, and starting measure the number they can do in a second (Random IOPS). You measure it that way, a typical hard drive is around 150-200 Random IOPS (this accounts for cache hits and contiguous files, if you do the math at 10ms seek time, you should have 100 random IOPS per second), the Vertex 3, for instance, is somewhere around 60,000 Random IOPS.
If you don't think Random IOPS is important, check and see how many files are inside your typical Windows installation directory. I just got the Properties on my install folder, and it was 88,316 files in 19,128 folders. If Windows uses even 1% of those files when it boots up (which is probably very low count - I'd bet it's closer to 5-10%), just in seek time your looking at 8832ms on a typical hard drive (8.3 sec), and 8.83ms on an SSD.
They are pricey, but don't fall into the trap of thinking you need ~everything~ on the SSD - you only need your OS and whatever few games you happen to be playing at the moment. For most people, 128G is plenty big enough for that.
However, if you don't want to go SSD, or just aren't convinced, that's fine too. It's your money and I can't blame you for not just blindly jumping on the bandwagon. Caviar Black is the way to go, Raptors are more or less a waste of money. They have a few very specific uses where they are very good (FRAPS, video editing, etc), but past that, SSD is just so much better, and Caviar Blacks are as good for much cheaper.
What about SSD caching? As I understand it, it is pretty much automating the storage on the SSD, putting all those small files you use the most, on the SSD. So a dynamic relationship between SSD and HDD.
You only really need a small 64gb SSD for this.
I have 120gb SSD on C: and 1TB normal HDD on
My SSD is running SATA3 and runs fast but I would not go under 120gb for C Drive I would stay 120 minimal I have found it easy to manage my C: drive and keep most things on
If I only had 64gb I think that would be a real struggle for me as I do like to keep certain programs on C:
But yes SSD as the main drive is the way to go it does help a great deal with gaming.
For a 1TB fast drive and 120GB OCZ drive you are talking £200 not as costly as you was making out.
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-076-OC&groupid=1657&catid=2101&subcat=
SSDs won't increase FPS, as many have said, but if that's the concern, then there's no need for anything past an average hard drive anyways.
Beyond that conern, SSDs are just amazing in how they change your computer's operation, and yes, that does include advantages for gaming. In BF3, the difference is SO big, that with my Vertex II, I'm usually in a game for 2-3 minutes before my friends with similar computers, but classic 7200RPM HDDs, even finish loading, and they curse me for it every single round. Windows start times are so low, that I'm actually starting to not care what runs at startup anymore (as long as programs in the tray don't use too much RAM and usually it's only a dozen or so megs apiece, save Steam). Origin, Steam, Impulse, Avira, Skype, Google Talk, Daemon Tools, Setpoint, my laptop (which has a 7200rpm drive) bogs down forever going through that much, while my desktop literally doesn't care.
Programs open and respond instantly, searches take place instantly, I paid $200 for my 120gb SSD, and I if I had that decision to make over again, I'd do it again without hesitation.
And yes, Quizzical basically has it right.
10000RPM drives are useless. Either get an SSD, or accept that you can't afford fast storage and stick with 7200rpm drives. Most of us strattle a middle ground, get the biggest SSD we can afford, and then just put some games on there, namely the ones that most benefit from it (and are most frequently played).
Even if that gets boiled down to BF3, Mechwarrior Online, and Guild Wars 2, and then just my OS and minor applications (office software, browser, etc), honestly, even that little bit is worth the $200 easily. For everything else, including games, I can suffer through the Caviar Green until I get a black, and then just suffer through a slightly less painful normal hard drive.
SSD's can increase FPS not by a huge amount only a little. I am talking stutter here less time stutters more FPS even if they eye can't see it so they do increase FPS
I am talking 3 to 5 FPS. Again I would not notice it on my system but google SSD FPS increase it explains fully there why FPS is increased.
You could use any size for this really, the more the better though. And it is a measurable speed increase, it isn't nearly as good as doing the split drive method that most people do.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4329/intel-z68-chipset-smart-response-technology-ssd-caching-review/4
(be sure to keep reading past this page).
It is something to consider if your just looking for an easy way to get a quick boost and can't afford to go all the way up to a 80G+ drive, but if you can get the bigger drive, your probably better off just splitting your data and running them as two separate drives and controlling what goes on the SSD and what doesn't.
Seems like (to me) that the performance increase only happens when you load applications and the improved load times aren't all that dramatic, even with an SSD as your main drive as opposed to just a cache. I'd rather put the money into a better processor or faster memory to improve the overall speed of the machine.
** edit **
I order this drive from newegg a couple weeks ago:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136533
Western Digital Caviar Black SATAIII 1TB drive. Right now it's $199, but when I ordered it, it was $119 and had free shipping. I don't know that right now is a real good time to buy a hard drive.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Not dramatic? Almost every action measured took 50-300% longer on a Seagate Barracuda than an SSD (cached or standalone) in this review, and most of the time it fell into the 100-300% range. All adobe application launches, all game launches and loads (except WoW launch), Windows boot, program installation, all fall within that 50-300% margin.
I'd call that pretty dramatic. Spending $200 wouldn't dramatically overhaul my CPU or GPU choices on what was a $1200 PC when I built it (it would have been marginal on both), far less so for a more expensive machine, but the difference in having everything I do that uses storage going 50% to three times quicker is quite dramatic, to the point that I often get very impatient with the computers in the house that don't have an SSD (a consequence I didn't really consider seriously). At the same time, this SSD will likely stick around through more than one machine, so then it's really more like losing $100 a machine to go to other things, which is even more marginal.
There are a lot of places I could save money if framerate in games was all that mattered. I could get a $10 headset instead of an $80 headset, or forgoe the $40 mouse (what I paid for a used G500), or the $30 keyboard, or use a 19' screen instead of a 24' screen, or get a much less durable and long-lasting case and save $50. I could even do all of those things, and cut corners elsewhere, and save a heck of a lot more than the price of an SSD, but there's more to using a computer than the CPU and GPU.
Hard drive prices are being seriously affected by the flooding in Thailand
I wouldn't expect them to start coming down for several weeks, if not months. They will probably continue to rise for a bit until the market situation stabilizes, then they will plateau and slowly fall as manufacturing capacity returns.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/28/us-thai-floods-drives-idUSTRE79R66220111028
It makes SSD's much more competitive, that's for sure.
I was curious, so I googled 'SSD FPS increase'
The top hit was an IGN discussion: "A SSD won't increase framerate for anything"
The second hit was Tom's Hardware: "And your FPS won't increase at all and neither will application performance, the SSD will only open things, close things, and load things faster"
In fact, in no article or link posted on the first page or results did it say anywhere that an SSD would increase FPS. There was a mention of it reducing hitching or stuttering, but in that same discussion it emphasized that overall FPS were unaffected.
I love SSD's, but I'm not a huge fan of misinformation. If you have a link I'd love to see it. I could possibly see Rage getting a FPS boost, simply because they use a unique texture format in that game, and there was an old discussion here about old games that streamed textures poorly getting an FPS boost (along with FPS being tied into network ping times). But overall I think FPS is relatively unaffected by hard drive so long as you aren't using virtual memory.
There's an article on Anandtech that covers it a bit.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2614/14
SSD's can increase the minimum FPS during texture streaming quite a bit. The amount average FPS is affected depends on if much texture streaming happens during your bench recording, and how long the bench is relative to how often it has to load textures from disk. Obviously if you just stand in one area or run in a small circle the SSD will have no affect once the textures are done loading. But in MMO's you often load on the fly as you enter new areas/new players show up and that's where SSD helps a lot. The important part is that your minimum FPS can be improved which is what you notice the most.
It's not going to help with min FPS that occurs simply because of extensive effects happening like explosions though, just the min fps issues that occurs where the textures aren't already in memory. I definitely notice it while playing SW:TOR btw, and I'm sure it would help a lot in WoW when you enter a city and have to load up every player's armor textures.
So SSD's help in OS load times and MMO area loads when moving from one texture theme to another, other than that, standard drives (7200) are still just about as good as it gets because it's more about cpu/gpu?
If that's the case then a 120 SSD for the OS and a couple MMO's while having a couple 7200's makes alot of sense. I'll probably be doing that.
I was curious, so I googled 'SSD FPS increase'
The top hit was an IGN discussion: "A SSD won't increase framerate for anything"
The second hit was Tom's Hardware: "And your FPS won't increase at all and neither will application performance, the SSD will only open things, close things, and load things faster"
In fact, in no article or link posted on the first page or results did it say anywhere that an SSD would increase FPS. There was a mention of it reducing hitching or stuttering, but in that same discussion it emphasized that overall FPS were unaffected.
I love SSD's, but I'm not a huge fan of misinformation. If you have a link I'd love to see it. I could possibly see Rage getting a FPS boost, simply because they use a unique texture format in that game, and there was an old discussion here about old games that streamed textures poorly getting an FPS boost (along with FPS being tied into network ping times). But overall I think FPS is relatively unaffected by hard drive so long as you aren't using virtual memory.
There's an article on Anandtech that covers it a bit.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2614/14
Good catch, and good article. Thanks for the link. I now stand informed.