HDD help

gropingmantis · 1 May 2011 at 21:00

Here is the deal.
I have two HDDs, a WD Scorpio Black 500GB and a WD Caviar Black 1TB.
Both are 7200rpm drives but my question is which one, if either, will be faster for games or will the difference in cache size (16 vs 64 MB) and drive size (2.5 vs 3.5 inch) make no difference whatsoever.

Krislord · 1 May 2011 at 21:23

The 3.5" drive is faster. These sugest about 15MB/s sequential read/write. It's as expected really otherwise we'd all be using 2.5" mechanical drives in our desktops.

Review 2.5"
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/reviews/pc-peripheral/3230773/western-digital-scorpio-black-500gb-review/

Speed test 3.5"
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/1tb-14hdd-roundup_9.html

gropingmantis · 1 May 2011 at 21:25

Is that going to make any noticable difference in gaming?

Krislord · 1 May 2011 at 21:36

I'm not a PC gamer so don't know for sure. I would expect it to be noticeable for those games that have a loading screen as lots of data is processed - during the actual gameplay I doubt it would be noticeable.

postmanfw · 1 May 2011 at 22:39

Faster hd means faster load times but once loaded up there will be no diff in gameplay whatsoever.

SparkyG · 2 May 2011 at 07:59

I would be surprised if you noticed any difference

gropingmantis · 2 May 2011 at 08:35

Ah I thought as much. Good-o.

Thanks chaps.