Freaky Hard Drive perfomance: just goes to show Benchmarks aren't always any use

[Zak33]

Lo people.

As lots of you know, I have a storeage fetish.. can't help it, just love having lots of empty space doing nowt

I have owned and installed OS's and games on loads of drives, including my latest favourites, the Hitachi 1Tb drives, WD AAKS and Blacks, Samsung F1's, WD RE2's etc etc etc.

I've installed OS's onto drives that other people hate (Maxtors) that are still going fine, and had total nightmares installing onto others...

but one thing I can never suss out is WHY are the old 80gb Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 and 7200.8's so fast at loading games?

saofg on this forum (known to many of you as Bishops Finger in Eve) has my two old Seagate Barracuda's that I used to have in RAID on an old S939 machine, and he has CoD4 and CoDW@W and ARMA2 installed on them, and they load SO much faster than any of my drives.

The synthetic benchamrks show them as slow... but in real life, they loads these games very fast.

It's not an issue of SATA controller, because we've just put them into a Gigabyte Intel board, and they were on an Asus S939 board... it makes no difference. They just load faster than anything else.

Anyone else got any older drives that just go like lightning?

[[GSV]Trig]

Nope, I've just got 2 SSD's instead

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I have an old(around 7 years IIRC) 7200RPM IDE WD hard drive which has 8MB cache and it is still fast enough for most things TBH. OTH,it runs very hot and always had this annoying high pitch sound which is characteristic of that model of hard drive.

[Pob255]

Strangely enough my os & non-games software hdd is still my old 80gb IDE seagate Barracuda 7200.9
Although I keep all my games on my 250gb sata WD AAKS

I have some great load times, which I notice when playing MMOs

[arthurleung]

I personally think too much cache (hence cache misses) and NCQ caused games to load slower...
Seek time had been creeping up as disk density increased and that have an effect too.

[scaryjim]

I've currently got my HTPC loading windows 7 off an old 40GB IDE drive (not sure what brand - might even be a Maxtor ) and, while I've not timed it, it seems to load in about the same time as the alledgedly fast SSDs Hexus have been testing recently - i.e. about 45secs from turn on to desktop. I'm going to be doing some power testing on Friday evening, so I might have a proper time of it to see if it's my imagination or if it really is that fast (although I guess some of that time will depend on how long it takes your mobo to POST...)

[Zak33]

pls do... cos I think that the comment about large cache's has some value to it.