Hey seen that there is plenty of people willing to lend knowledge to those less informed and would love some help.

Looking to get a slave drive dedicated for my gameing PC to run an MMO off of. Have seen that solid state drives are supposed to be fantastic speeds but not sure if its worth the investment over say something like a 15000 raptor drive.

Would love the pros and cons of each if someone knows enough about them.

any input would be appriciated.

Hi, welcome to GTG

I can give you a few pros and cons of each.

SSD: Pros

• Very fast read and write speeds.
• Very little heat produced since it's not mechanical[
• Very quiet
• Less prone to failing

SSD: Cons

• Very expensive for the space you get

Raptor: Pros

• Not as expensive as SSD
• Still a very fast drive

Raptor: Cons

• Not as quiet as SSD
• More heat generated

In my opinion, if you're looking for a hard drive to run a game off of, a Velociraptor would probably be a great choice. Right now, for the price, I would only really buy a SSD to boot an OS off of.

This post has been edited by mpascal: Nov 8 2009, 02:30 PM

thanks for welcome and the info i know either way it will be a bit of money for it, but both me and my significant other are avid players of EverQuest 2 and always looking for ways to help the game run a bit smoother. We arnt rich so even a couple hundred dollars on upgrades puts us in a tight pinch for the month. But both of us having modorately priced gameing rigs it seemed like a good idea to have a dedicated HD just for the game and without the fairly high price tag of going raid HDs or bleeding edge GPU.

I myself am constantly trying to learn new ways to tweak machines to get the most out of them without much money to go on. I am not hugely interested in overlocking as if i were to make a mistake and cause any perminent damage to the hardware it would take me months to round up the funds to replace the damaged unit. I am sure there are plenty of others like me too.

oh and if so inclined i would also greatly apprciate any thoughts on what else i could do help overall performance. Already try to keep up to date with the latest drivers for my gear at least to my knowledge which i admit i could have made a mistake or two since im admittedly no expert.

Heres my system specs:
Mobo: Asus P5K/EPU
CPU: Intel quad core Q6600 2.40 GHZ (Kentsfield)
GPU: 2x ATI Radion HD 2600XT (512 DDR3 each)running crossfire with dual bridges
RAM: 4 Gigs DDR2 800 PC2 6400
HD: Western Digital 640 Gig 7200RPM
Case: Antec 900 (love it!)
PSU: OCZ 700W (of course crossfire ready)

My girlfriend has a similar build so hopefully any suggestions would be beneficial to both of us. If having a full list of her specs as well would be useful let me know and ill get them ASAP

Thanks so much for all the help

Hi,

Looking at your system specs now, you should be just fine to run Everquest II. If you want, maybe running it off of a faster hard drive like a Velociraptor would benefit you. You should probably be able to buy a smaller one for a fairly reasonable price. After that, I'd say that the video cards would be the next to be upgraded, but even they are still looking pretty good. Are there any noticeable issues while you two are playing?

Well the strange part of it comes from the fact that we suffere from lag issues on different parts of the game. She seems to have problems from zoneing from one area of the game to the next, times when her computer seems to have indegestion when trying to load the area into her ram ... i can only guess that she may need a ram upgrade, i know she runs a little less ran then me ... i think around 2 to 3 gigs, i didnt build her machine and ironicly she doesnt like me pokeing around with her rig .

Where as i hit problems with lag inside zones, i have almost no problem zoneing but there are times when dealing with particle effects specificly atmostpheric effects such as fog simulations that it seems my GPUs get confused with how to handle them. I spent hours tinkering with the in game graphic options and the only way i have figured out how to fix the issue is turn off certain particle effects. Would this simply have to do with the the way the game wants the effects rendered and my GPUs doing it differently? or am i just off my rocker in that thought?

And yeah i was thinking the Dedicated HDs would help with smoother proformance overall, now just to manage to earn the money to afford those little beasties.

P.S. Yall are awsome, this is the first tech sight that seems more interested in teaching rather then strokeing of ones ego by preying on those less informed. So from a budding geek to all of you I would like to say Thank You!!

Hi,

The issue that you have with Everquest is rather strange. Your graphics cards seem like they should run the game smoothly.

As for the other problem, I think the loading time between zones would be slowed with a faster hard drive or more RAM. Both of those can effect the rate at which new zones are loaded.

Glad I have been able to help thus far, we're all budding geeks at one point