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Serious Sam II is probably an example of a wrinkle in the Hitachi Deskstar 7K160 rapport. Though results with a single drive configuration is pretty much the same with the Maxtor DiamondMax 10, using two Deskstar 7K160 in a array will actually get you longer loading times in this game, with this particular level. Though that might be just the twitch in our fingers, it's unlikely so since even the shortest results with the Hitachi Deskstar 7K160 RAID 0 array is almost the same as the longest results with other configurations.

With these results, we can see that hard drive performance is still a factor, even when you're playing games. With more graphically intensive games and environments, the amount of data used will grow and the slower your hard drive, the longer you have to wait when loading a level. True, not all games will behave the same way - F.E.A.R is definitely the most sensitive to hard drive performance out of the three games we use in this test.  It's actually sensitive enough for RAID 0 (stripe) to matter.

Conclusion:

Hard drives are important, they are the mainstay of storage for computers everywhere for as long as they are computers. Though many changes have occurred during the last few years, the most important factors regarding hard drive performance is relatively constant - transfer rate, access time and CPU utilization. The Hitachi Deskstar 7K160 has a healthy helping in those department, enough for gamers who want shorter load times and overall better storage performance.

You might say, does 2 - 4 seconds shorter load times matter? Well, that actually depends on your hard drive usage. It may not be if you are the non-quintessential gamer who follows developer guidelines and not run anything else in the background, that repeatedly reads and writes to the hard drive. However, we now live in a world where we are constantly connected. When we play games, it's very likely we will also be listening to songs, downloading some files and the all important instant messaging clients. Like any other software and the game you're playing, these background software is accessing the hard drive. In this type of situation, hard drive statistics like burst speed, access time and CPU utilization are small yet important factors. Having a better hard drives in regard to those statistics might just help.

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