If you’re building the ultimate gaming PC, you must have a lot of things on your mind–the fastest CPU, memory, video cards and the list goes on. Often times, the hard drive is overlooked but the hard drive plays an integral part in a gaming PC and can affect game play significantly. If you’re in the market to build a great gaming PC, the wrong hard drive can ruin all your hard work and expenses. Here are some things to look for when buying a hard drive for a gaming rig:

Capacity

Obvious, but true. Many gamers end up buying cheap hard drives and setting up a RAID system. While there are benefits to having a RAID system, there are also a lot of drawbacks. There are many different forms of RAID, RAID 0 being the fastest and simplest configuration, but even then you may notice a slightly slower performance speed, and for gamers who have played high intensity games, any kind of lag, even if it’s mere seconds, can deeply affect game play. If you want to back up your files to keep them safe in case your computer crashes, the fastest and easiest way that would not affect performance speed would be to buy an external hard drive.

Buying a single, large hard drive also means less heat production in your rig. If you’re a PC gamer, you know how hard your PC works to support your gaming addiction. A single PC, if not properly fitted with enough fans or cooling solutions can easily heat up a room on a winter’s day. Less hard drives quite simply means less heat and less of a chance of a crash due to overheating. It also means that you’ll save money because you won’t have to buy extra fans to dissipate the heat.

And lastly, the benefit of having just one hard drive in your rig means that you’ll have more space in your tower for more important things like a kick-arse video card and sound card. If you want something to take up space, you want your video card and sound card to fill it up, not your hard drive.

Performance

There are two specs you want to look out for when building a rig. That is the RPM & cache size. For an acceptable PC gaming centre, you’ll need at least an RPM of 7200. Anything slower and your hard drive will be as special and as fast as your grandma’s pc. The cache or buffer size is also important. The bigger the cache, the more files it can quickly pull up. If you’ve ever had your computer work slow and hard to pull up a document, video, or sound file you know exactly how annoying a small cache size is. A small cache size, and frankly an unacceptable size for a gaming rig, is 8GB. For a gaming PC, you’ll want at least 32GB or cache or buffer size.

To be safe, you’ll also want to buy a well-known brand name. Successful hard drive companies signify reliability and if there’s one thing you need from your hard drive, it’s reliability. The day you lose all your files and your hard drive is wiped due to faulty hardware is a bad, bad day. A Seagate 500GB SATA hard drive is a good example of a reasonably priced, reliable, and high performance hard drive, perfect for a gamer. 500GB is a reasonable amount of storage. Keep in mind there are hard drives that offer up to 2 terabytes of storage. It all just depends on how much you tend to store up, but 500GB is typically a large amount of storage space for the average gamer. Prices on hard drives with 1TB of storage has significantly gone down in the past couple years, so if you have huge video or music files, consider a terabyte solution.Companies like Seagate, Western Digital and Hitachi have made quality products over the years and continue to do so, so buying from them is usually a safe bet.

Did you know?

Currently, the biggest hard drive for a PC that you can get on the market is 2 TB large. That’s 2000 GB of storage!!

-Miljean

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