Does hard drive speed affect gaming performance?

[riCtus]

So i have a pc with acceptable specs for gaming but i have a very bad and old hard drive. Would this hard drive affect low fps/stutter or things that make the gaming unplayable. And when i mean gaming...i mean playing like Forza Horizon 3 and high end games not esports games like CS:GO. I'll upload a pic of my hard drive speed.(CrystalDiskMark test)

[minibois]

It could affect it, as the hard drive (or other disk drive) is loading in the texture files the GPU has to render.

[Dujith]

Short answer: yes

 

The esport games will be very optimized for 1 map and will not need to load textures and data on the fly that much if not anything from the HDD

But when your playing something that needs to read data on the fly it will impact your performance alot.

 

Better to get a cheap SSD, that will outperform the HDD with ease

[Tabs]

It depends on the game. Games that load a level and then have the entire level in memory will be fine once loaded, but loading will take a while. A game like World of Warcraft is heavily affected by hard drive performance because it streams assets as you move between areas, and loading screens are only for instancing.

 

I don't believe it will affect Forza, but I don't know exactly how it loads - if it has one long-ish loading screen before a race, you should be fine once loaded. But loading times may be pretty bad. 

[LunaP0n3]

Tough to say. I think games cache graphics into RAM to reduce dependencies on system storage, but you might experience hitches here and there as the game loads data from disk.

Perhaps an SSD upgrade is on the horizon? (See what I did there?)

[riCtus]

Good thing i already ordered an ssd 3 days ago, thanks everyone!

[AskTJ]

Get a small capacity SSD and a HDD for storage. Keep games on the SSD, as well as Windows.

[TechyBen]

Very old drives, yes. Most new working drives, not much. A simple 500gb/1tb HDD or a SSD (120-500gb) will give you average load times and game streaming.

 

Times when an old drive will cause game stutters are if a virus checker/Windows service in the background tries to load a file, hits a brick wall waiting, and causes CPU wait chains to bottle neck.

 

A newer drive works so smoothly, that the system won't chug/choke when Windows update checks something during your CS:GO game.

 

I assume (I have not tested) more RAM can help... but if you are on an old drive, your budget probably won't stretch to more ram, if you already cannot afford faster/newer hardware.  

 

[edit]

PS, post your full specs and which games you play (some are GPU dependant, some RAM and some CPU) if you want advice on which part will affect gaming the most.

[riCtus]

Just now, AskTJ said:

Get a small capacity SSD and a HDD for storage. Keep games on the SSD, as well as Windows.

Yh, i already ordered one of those 256gb chinese ssd's and the speed should be fine because my motherboard supports only sata 2 storage. It wouldnt be a difference with good hard drives like samsung 850 evo series

[riCtus]

5 minutes ago, TechyBen said:

Very old drives, yes. Most new working drives, not much. A simple 500gb/1tb HDD or a SSD (120-500gb) will give you average load times and game streaming.

 

Times when an old drive will cause game stutters are if a virus checker/Windows service in the background tries to load a file, hits a brick wall waiting, and causes CPU wait chains to bottle neck.

 

A newer drive works so smoothly, that the system won't chug/choke when Windows update checks something during your CS:GO game.

 

I assume (I have not tested) more RAM can help... but if you are on an old drive, your budget probably won't stretch to more ram, if you already cannot afford faster/newer hardware.  

 

[edit]

PS, post your full specs and which games you play (some are GPU dependant, some RAM and some CPU) if you want advice on which part will affect gaming the most.

i5 2500

rx 460 2gb

10 gb ram 1333 dual channel

I mostly play CS:GO but i also play Sea Of Thieves sometimes. Lately i've been thinking to play Forza Horizon 3 and Horizon 4 when it comes out.

 

[TechyBen]

Yeah, an SSD will help with load times and games that stream textures/data/levels. So not really much change. Have you checked resource monitor when playing games?

 

PS, when I say "new drive" I mean an old 120gb PATA 5000revs vs a newer 500gb SATA 7500revs... an "old" drive does not necessarily slow down, it just might be old slow tech (like the first SSDs which were SLOW).

[riCtus]

37 minutes ago, TechyBen said:

Yeah, an SSD will help with load times and games that stream textures/data/levels. So not really much change. Have you checked resource monitor when playing games?

 

PS, when I say "new drive" I mean an old 120gb PATA 5000revs vs a newer 500gb SATA 7500revs... an "old" drive does not necessarily slow down, it just might be old slow tech (like the first SSDs which were SLOW).

I've tested Forza Horizon 3 today the cpu runs like 70-100% and gpu runs most of the time at 100% and it doesn't seem they are bottlenecking each other, but the ram tho...it's taking 8-9 out of 10 gb that i have even with only horizon 3 and no apps runing on the background. Also cpu and gpu temps seem to be fine at 78 degrees max.

[TechyBen]

How much ram do the games use? Google knows all: 

 

Seems a little more ram might help... but you do already have 10gb.