Hard drive speed?

i think you would not see a significant difference in terms of overall performance but surely there will be improvements in terms of loading times and execution of data access.

Windows itself wouldn't be much better, but your boot times and especialy game loading times would be better. Is this drive IDE or SATA?

There would be no noticeable difference while playing games. But Windows would load faster, and games would load faster. That is, if you go with RAID 0, or RAID 0+1, or RAID 10 or one of the striping RAID configurations. If you did RAID 1 there would be no speed difference, but in case one of your drives failed, you still have all of your stuff on the other.

Personally i've noticed quite a significant performance increase since upgrading to SATA from IDE. You can really benefit from faster data transfer and faster read/write processing.

And to continue on what Dopin said, RAID 0 is for performance, but watch out for power outages. RAID 1 is a more secure system, but it dosn't have any increased performance.

While RAID 0 splits your data between the drives so that the share the laod, RAID 1 will actualy keep 2 copies of your data, one on each drive. It helps protect from drive failure and power surges.

@t0ffe3m4n, there is a difference between SATA and RAID.

sorry toffee but i think he was talking about plugging his old drive onto the system and doing a RAID or is that what u meant?

Thank you

It is an IDE drive. I'm asking so I can justify to myself spending the cash to replace a 6 year old hard drive. Ive spent so much time upgrading other components it never occured to me that the drives themselvse could just be outdated. Thanks for your help.

Any recomendations for drives?

I'm guessing you're going to want SATA. But are you planning on doing RAID? And if you are then would you want RAID 0, which is data striping and will create a speed boost in loading times, especially noticeable in loading times in games. Or would you want RAID 1, which is data mirroring which creates an exact replica of the same thing on each drive so if one fails you still have all your info on the other. Here is a good site about RAID.

And how much space do you need?