Opinions Requested

Pisces · 08-09-16, 10:40 AM

I understand that you already have the harddrives in your possession. So the following is probably moot and late. But I'll still add it for completeness. The SATA III specs are the upper limit of the electrical signal transfer rate, not the max data IO datarate. It says nothing about the actual data rate that you can expect from the physical drive, especially if it is mechanically based (magnetic platters). Datarates of mechanical harddrives are very dependent on what sort of files you need to acces, and how the filesystem is dispersed on the disk. If the files are large and continuous (all sectors nicely defragmented and sequential) you can approach max specs. If the OS is running on it too then applications/games will have to suffer a bit depending on what needs to be done. But since the game SH3 is based on many small files it will never reach those manufacturer published drive specs. It needs to do a lot of overhead processing to access those predominently small files. For this kind of game an SSD (solid state disk) is a much better solution for better performance. It is all electronics and flash-chips based. It has no moving parts (magnetic reading arm) that needs to swing across the platter to find the spot. It just needs to decode the right memory location in the chip and spit it's content out. I has very low seeking response times compared to mechanical disks. You can easily notice the performance gain if you run your OS from it. Unfortunately they are quite a bit more expensive than regular drives. (for the same size)

08-09-16, 10:40 AM	#9
Pisces Silent Hunter Join Date: Dec 2004 Location: AN9771 Posts: 4,904 Downloads: 304 Uploads: 0	I understand that you already have the harddrives in your possession. So the following is probably moot and late. But I'll still add it for completeness. The SATA III specs are the upper limit of the electrical signal transfer rate, not the max data IO datarate. It says nothing about the actual data rate that you can expect from the physical drive, especially if it is mechanically based (magnetic platters). Datarates of mechanical harddrives are very dependent on what sort of files you need to acces, and how the filesystem is dispersed on the disk. If the files are large and continuous (all sectors nicely defragmented and sequential) you can approach max specs. If the OS is running on it too then applications/games will have to suffer a bit depending on what needs to be done. But since the game SH3 is based on many small files it will never reach those manufacturer published drive specs. It needs to do a lot of overhead processing to access those predominently small files. For this kind of game an SSD (solid state disk) is a much better solution for better performance. It is all electronics and flash-chips based. It has no moving parts (magnetic reading arm) that needs to swing across the platter to find the spot. It just needs to decode the right memory location in the chip and spit it's content out. I has very low seeking response times compared to mechanical disks. You can easily notice the performance gain if you run your OS from it. Unfortunately they are quite a bit more expensive than regular drives. (for the same size)