Importance of Hard Drive Performance

[Bob43]

Does the speed of the hard drive have any major impact on the performance PC games, other than the time it takes to load the application and various levels, etc?? Will the game play just as well with a 5400 RPM drive as a 7200 RPM drive during the gameplay itself (frame rates)??

Thanks!

[richard_cocks]

Personally I find a lot of the aggrevation of having a slow computer whilst playing games is that of loading time.

However, there is a small framerate difference whilst playing, because not everything (especially sounds) is cached when loading the game.

[AllGamer]

7200 vs 5400 differece is only during the loading part as you said, and during new stages/levels

but inside the game, it has little to no effect if you have a good CPU and enough RAM

if you DEPENDS on the crappy PAGEFILE/ SWAPFILE the obviously it'll be slow like hell, even with the 7200 or a SCSI at 15000

:D :t

[Logan2002]

Yeah virtual ram does not compare to "real" ram.