The performance of a hard drive can also vary greatly from unit to unit. The rate of data transfer to and from the drive and its data cache can all play an important role in the overall performance of your gaming system.
In order to take full advantage of fast seek times and cached data, the hard drive must deliver collected information as fast as possible and that’s where the unit’s interface technology takes over. Over the last few years, Serial-ATA technology has quickly replaced the earlier Parallel-ATA specification as the preferred interface for high-performance hard drives.
Some cutting-edge hard drives on the market today offer another performance differentiator called Native Command Queuing. This advancement allows the hard drive to automatically reorder requests for data in a manner that maximizes speed. Say for instance, you need fast access to data files that are located throughout the disk. NCQ gathers all the files that are close together at the same time before going after files located elsewhere. It would be like going to the grocery store with a shopping list that includes carrots, celery and peanut butter. Without NCQ you might pick up the carrots then go get the peanut butter and then come all the way back for the celery.
A drive’s buffer size can also make a huge performance difference. In much the same way that RAM is essential in providing lightning-fast access to commonly used CPU data, hard drives use a cache system to speed up performance. Hard drives typically used in today’s business applications offer 8MB of cache. Higher-end consumer systems, such as media centers, usually provide a 16MB buffer. For maximum data processing, hard drive manufacturers offer drives with up to 32MB of cache today, as it is the case with the terabyte drive.
Computer games are only increasing in performance-demanding sophistication. Multi-threaded, AI-centric, frame-intensive action will require faster, more reliable equipment. As always, the real edge will be obtained by those who go beyond the obvious and look to maximize all the components of their gaming system – and that includes the hard drive.
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