hard drives effect performance

[RatTwist]

Recently I had an old 500GB drive die meaning i had to reinstall my OS to my newer 1TB drive, straight away i noticed the drive was a lot faster when opening things like windows explorer and other programs, i also noticed some games that previously my PC struggled with I could now run on at least medium, where previously I would have to put everything as low as possible. Is it possible a faster drive increased the performance of my games? 

[SeanAngelo]

3 minutes ago, RatTwist said:

Recently I had an old 500GB drive die meaning i had to reinstall my OS to my newer 1TB drive, straight away i noticed the drive was a lot faster when opening things like windows explorer and other programs, i also noticed some games that previously my PC struggled with I could now run on at least medium, where previously I would have to put everything as low as possible. Is it possible a faster drive increased the performance of my games? 

load games faster, yes

 

but not increase fps....

[Max_Settings]

1 minute ago, SeanAngelo said:

load games faster, yes

 

but not increase fps....

99% of the time this is true. There are very rare cases, usually in games with large worlds, were drive speed actually can increase FPS because your system has to go to the drive to grab data. DayZ is the only game that I have personally experienced where this is the case, I get a 10-20fps boost by having the game on an SSD rather than an HDD.

[Sebivor]

It's possible. Your computer may be running out of physical memory, which would cause paging to and from your hard disk. A faster drive might improve the speed of your system as a whole when this is happening.

Consider opening up resource monitor, playing your game for a while, and seeing what bottlenecks:

 

• Does your committed memory approach or exceed the amount of RAM in your system?
• Does read/write activity to your disk increase? When?

You might benefit even more a RAM upgrade, or from a cheap SSD dedicated to the purpose; preferably a RAM upgrade...

[TechSquidTV]

8 minutes ago, SeanAngelo said:

load games faster, yes

 

but not increase fps....

Games like minecraft can have their FPS affected by slow hdds because of a large amount of writing to disk while exploring and generating the world. But most of the time you would be correct.