Old HDD vs. New HDD: Game Load Times
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 14 ต.ค. 2024
- How much faster can a new HDD make your games load?
Tonight on GHGtv, we aim to find out.
Tonight's testing is simple. We are putting a 5 year old WD Caviar Blue up with over 400GB of stuff on it up against a Brand New WD Black that manufactured in June this year.
The results are impressive.
We test load times in:
GTA V, Fallout 4, Doom and Left 4 Dead 2.
Why did I go Western Digital? ( I am in no way sponsored )
I trust their drives everyday, and they are yet to let me down.
I hope you'll enjoy tonights show, I am certainly enjoying my new hard drive.
---- GHGtv ep44
This is not completely fair, the new hard drive fits twice more data in the same space as the old one, that translates to: higher data density, and thus, more data being read by the drive at each revolution of the platter. Storage capacity in machanical drives of the same form factor is directly related to their maximum output performance, because of the data density.
Edit: Also, fragmentation plays a big role, as well as drive wear. Hard drives are mechanical devices, they need a physical device to track the information in the platter, and this precision fades out over time.
thst was the point
The point was that new hdds have better optimization etc. If he used a new wd blue with the same specs, speed would probaby be very similar, yes.
That's the point of the video.
I agree, it would be a better comparison if he included an old HDD recently gone through a full defrag.
the old HDD might be over 4 years old meaning machinal degredation and data degredation even defraging a old HDD would not increase its performance that much trust me.... and the 1TB black uses 2 500GB platers whereass the blue a single 500GB platter so the data density is the same
This is probably due to the old drive probably not having been defragmented in a while so the data took longer to read due to high fragmentation compared to the new WD Black which would have had very little fragmentation. Not saying that HD technology hasn't advanced at all, but in the end, game loading time is hard-limited to the read speed of the drive and fragmented data access speed anyways.
what is that amazing song saying "go bluetooth pizza" lmfao
ikr
It's the Shenmue pizza place song.
thank you fine man/lady/attack helicopter or whatever you identify as, I owe you one...
I KNEW IT SOUNDED FAMILIAR, SHENMOO!
It's called "Bob's Pizza".
No mans sky on PS1?????
Dont mind if I do :)
Lmao 0.5fps
Probably still runs better than it does on most pc's pre patch :p
Disturbed Elmo LOL!
Wolves4ever 01 Fair enough :/
0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
ERRROR
NOT ENOUGH MEMORY TO DISPLAY ENOUGH ZEROES IN THAT LOW FPS NUMBER
But you're comparing a blue to a black, black's are already faster, so isn't this test inconclusive?
Shhhhh
Not always. 1TB 7200 RPM Blues are slightly faster than 1TB Blacks. Read storage benchmarks.
Idk why everyone says they're faster then ^.^
Onion Rings
IIRC it was a surprise to everyone who did a performance comparison.
If it receives a lot of external vibrations then the black is typically faster and will last longer. But if it's excessive it's better to just get an SSD.
If you need multible drives in the same box, muliple blacks are best if you don't need RAID, but RED if you do. Otherwise if you only need one drive and the environment is relatively quiet and shock free get a blue. It also costs a lot less. A music recording studio might consider a black if they don't need the performance of an SSD.
I chose to get a black in my future build list because black has 2TB drives but blue only has 1TB drives, I'd rather pay a little more for a 2TB then have two 1TBs
I originally thought the Video would be comparing Sata and IDE. NOW that's an IDEa for a decent Video.
Nice pun...lol
plz stop, the puns hurt.
DO NOT FUCKING EVER TALK ABOUT THOSE RIBBON BASTARDS EVER AGAIN.
hahaha they broke when i hotswap on xbox
U should do a video on over clocking monitors
My monitor is running on 4.1 GHz xD
Well done.
+Kili Studios it's an actual process in which you go over the "Hz" spec of the monitor.
Ali Abdallah What's the purpose of it? Increase the refresh rate?
+GamingKidTwelve yes
Fun fact: The 1 TB versions of both the WD Caviar Blue and WD Caviar Black (both released around the same year) are pretty much identical in performance. All you get with the Caviar Black is more warranty.
Blacks are slightly faster due to faster access times, have anti vibration mounts within the casing, and the extended warranty. But yes, they are pretty much identical
How about just put an SSD in it
bloody new games are 40-60GB, so an affordable 250GB SSD fills up with 3/4 titles.
+blaser lol true
Lol currently putting an SSD In one of my laptops
I have 480gb SSD and 1TB HDD. Put games like Fallout on my SSD and games like CS:GO or Dota to my HDD. If my SSD runs out of space I can always transfer the games to my HDD. I can't imagine me playing ten 60gb games at a time.
I've upgraded a few times, and given away 120GB and 240GB SSDs to friends/family members as I have upgraded. As it stands now, I currently have a Samsung 850 Evo 500GB (460GB when formatted) as an boot drive with a dozen games that can actually benefit from an SSD, along with core programmes for video and audio production along with plugins. I still have 112GB to spare. Other than that, I also have a Barracuda 1TB for other games, as well as Barracuda 2TB for data storage and virtual machines. I also have a spare HyperX 3K 250GB, which I use for stream capture.
I guess it depends on where you live, but I've seen a 500GB SSDs for around the same as a game at full retail price.
ssds all the way,- but i must say its crazy how much faster the newer high capacity drives are these days. i copied with up to 240mb/s over usb 3!! Veeery impressed. 12tb seagate to 12tb seagate for which i payed 130 each€. 8TB samsung ssd was 600. And in hindsight i believe the ssds money wasnt that well spended.
so uh, the Blue was also defragged as well before this load time bench, right?
I commented on the same thing. This test was worthless.
All these people that love his vids are gonna go waste money on WD Blacks and not get the same results.
If it ran Vista or newer it was defragmented.
+NO MA'AM not immediately it won't be. that's usually set as a scheduled maintenance task, and is usually done when the system is sitting idle for a long time. so unless this box was kept on for days on end and not shut off so the maintenance task could start, it won't happen.
and even then, usually never happens. as someone who runs machines for 24/7 use, I can say there's been more occasions than I can count on two hands where I've had to manually start a defrag session just to get some read speed back to the system on the OS drive.
***** If the scheduled task is missed, it is run the next time the computer is idle, which is checked every 15 minutes, not days.
this is how I do see it
SSD- For frequently played games
HDD- For storing games
I definitely agree. With the new PC I'm in the process of getting the parts for, I've chosen an SSD as a boot drive and I might put a few games on it.
Just built a new desktop and sold my last to a friend for a really cheap price so the lad could finally have something more than the 2009 laptop that was cheap back then. I got a 140GB SSD for booting windows and a 2TB SSHD for everything else and I can confidently say I'm happy with the boot times now. Such a big improvement, glad I did it.
That must have been a really really old HDD, usually 10 year old HDDs perform very simliar the new ones. Nothing has changed in the way they work since years.
SH4D0WG4M3S Not even that.
the hard drive is from 2011
***** Ive 2x 250gb from 2003 scavenged from a old desktop and I know from experience that these drives are almost half the speed of my 2tb WD, which is 200MB/s.
Thats a really old HDD and the games Ive installed on it run as good as those from the 2tb.
The test isn't really a comparison of HDD speeds over the years. Rather, it's to see how beneficial installing a secondary HDD for games is.
it was about 5/6 years cos it was wd blue and i think 500gb
your taste in music is a gift sent by the angels
"Go Bluetooth Pizza!" Is officially classed among the ranks of GHG Inside Joke Legends such as Rebecca Black and the Saab 93.
It's like 12 in Australia wtf green ham
yeah man wtf
6 in germany feels good man
it's 18 in france :D
ye basically 18 aswell but for the aussi 6pm
scheduled uploads.
One issue I have is that the WD Black drives are built for performance, whereas the Blue drives are more for general use. It would've been a much better competition if you compared an old Blue drive with a new one.
Love that rayman music at the beginning. Rayman was the first game I ever played and I still love it :)
It was my first game as well, I loved the music, the cartoon backdrops, and the crazy characters.
But to this day, I haven't got past the blue mountains :(
ramen
The best thing for mechanical hdd loading is getting software like primocache or supercache and set a ramcache for your drive if you have the available ram. It won't help on the initial load, but for subsequent loads it's awesome.
This is a full blue hdd (who knows how many windows installations where on) vs empty black hdd (higher tier model) comparison, as he said at 4:20 and not old vs new. Of course the empty one is going to be alot faster.
Got my first gaming PC today! Wish me luck in the future guys!
Welcome to the master race!
xSebaaa Just got GTA yesterday! Fucking amazing and love it!
SheriffGamer whats the PC specs
Joseph Goble Intel i5 6400 2.7Ghz
8GB DDR4. It's not the best but can run GTA no prob.
SheriffGamer video card ?
It's nice that you added how much these things cost in kr! I love your videos btw.
SVERIGE
SVERIGE
SVERIGEEEE
lol if there is a euro price you can easily calculate the Swedish value
lol if there is a euro price you can easily calculate the Swedish value
How could I just forget about this channel. I love it
without a defrag before the tests i can't trust the results, since the the bests result were achived by the most recent installed game(i guess) i have a fell that a defrag maybe was needed, and what has ben done between the hard drive: copy or reinstall? if the latter the result are even less reliable. Now i know that is possible that you did a defrag on the previous since you know more about hardware than me, or you have an os where it doesn't really matters since it does everything for you(again i know nothing about this either so this comment is a bit pretentious i know) or a sector by sector copy, I would have appreciated some more details on the process.
Modern Windows OSes defaults to automatically defrag your drives every week, and since he is running the latest titles, once can assume he is running a modern Windows OS.
He may have just plocked this drive in his system for testing. It is more than likely that he has an SSD as his boot drive, because anyone who has any common sense runs one :p. If he stated both were formatted beforehand, or at least defragged, then the results could be trusted a bit more. For all we know, the blue is fragmented to hell.
+Xplosio Lee www.laptopmag.com/articles/defragment-hard-drive-windows
the first google result tells that auto defrag is not reabile, i guess in a pc heavly used and rarley left idle(and maybe that pc is in this state), it does not have the time to work, and since the moving of file is like a defrag in the new drive that can remove the clean install factor, but not the fragmentation one, and was not explained in the video by any means. giving fragmentation status of the drives would have made this review a bit more trustworthy, but in this state it means only that if loading times are long maybe you can shorten them without mayor hardware changes
That's right! And imo he should have tested an OLD hard drive, a WD Blue isn't that old.
+Roberto De Gasperi The Passport in the link isn't consistently defragmented probably because it is an external drive and not consistently connected.
I believe strongly in the modularity of PC, and that lets your spread out your purchases, I currently have 2 HDD and 2 SSD in my system, a 256gb SSD as boot drive, and a 128gb exclusively for steam library, and a 1TB and a 600GB Western Digital Blue drives. Also I did some testing on my old 600gb and my new 1TB drive, and yes newer vs older HDD even with the same RPM, even newer by only a few years, gives almost double the read write speed.
Awesome video as usual!
Mate this is already the third time that I litteraly fell asleep when watching your videos😂This time I fell asleep at 7 o'clock evening😂😂
Defragging your harddrive can speed up the load times. WARNING DO NOT DEFRAG YOUR SSD
you want to hear what's better, it will actualy speed them up, but kill so much P/E cycles, that it's pointless. The best thing to speedup ssd is do secure erase, when you see it slow down writes ( erase all data ).
"Defragging" SSD triggers TRIM command in windows
@@pnnytx hahaha
i remember back when the 360 and ps3 were preparing to release and they said we wouldnt have load screens...
Rayman 1 soundtrack?
Yes. It's called 'harmony'
you always bring back my memories with the music you put in your video's. pretty sure you played all the games i did. rayman. a game to never forget, almost got your silver play button! you deserved it man =)
No Man's Sky PS1 version
what???
its PS1
***** yeah even if there was one it would instantly crash specially todays hardware to would sometimes crash ( PC to be exact)
sorry about that >,
Steve080501 np mate, people make mistakes right??
Arran Bear Yup
So close to 100K subs.
I think you should do something special for it! Like building a computer, completely from scratch, for as little as physically possible. Whether it's new parts or used parts, and no matter the era, as long as the parts don't come from another one of your many machines :)
at 3:39 you can see 55 seconds change to 55 minutes
lol
I'm interested in the used space of both drives. You will generally get the most noticeable performance boost on HDDs simply by writing to the blocks on the outer side(s) of the spinning disk(s) of the HDD, which is usually automatically done when writing to the empty disk. Thus, drives with less used space should be faster. Since the old drive was - well - old and therefore probably had already written stuff to it this could very well explain the difference in performance just as much or more than the difference in model. In my opinion 5 years is no age for an Hard Drive.
EDIT: Just saw the 400GB remark in the description... so sadly not a fair comparison.
go bluetooth piza!
go bluetooth pizza!
go bluetooth pizzza!
go bluetooth pizza!
he still puts in so much time and effort into these videos, amazing youtuber with really cool content. Real cool guy, wish he got more credit for it
Was that we blue a 5400rpm drive?
all blues are 5400rpm yeah
Mine's 7200 RPM. It might just be previous generations of Blue.
I have a 2200 rpm hard drive. 80GB. ;)
I have a 15GB Hard drive that has a RPM that couldn't be read.
It was a 7200, you could see it on the drive. WD recently released a 5400rpm skew of the blues, which are just rebrands of the slower greens.
Cant wait till you go over 100k Subs! GHGtv Rocks!
How come the WDBlack is so much faster at loading Doom than the WDBlue
But what causes it
maybe it has massive fragmentation
The wd blacks are a performance drive That doesn't care bout noise and if in mot mistaken is spinning faster than the other drive. 7200rpm vs 5000rpm? Thing is these two drives were actually released around the same time and they are practically the same age its just that one is a budget slower option and the other is a higher speed performance option. The data density on the black might be greater and paired with a better controller the computer might be able to get more info off the drive because the actual arm inside the drive has more data to read per given time. The last one is just an educated guess on my part.
since the blue one is much older,so there's a lot of background process running off it. So the hard drive has to load more things than just the game.
Joe Mattock Well yea that we can all assume but what hes asking is what is the tech inside and how does it differ between drives and how does this difference result in a performance increase in the better one.
Thanks for recommending the tea. I was having trouble deciding what to drink.
Just save up for a full SSD rig, it's so much nicer
7200 rpm,hdd
Your channel is gold dude, glad you grew so big, youre providing really good content
“ *G o B l u e t o o t h P i z z a* “
I feel like the new one only did better because the old is fragmented. 10,000RPM alone won't decrease load times in DOOM over 5,400 as it did in the video. If the Blue was wiped, I bet it would have done much better because a single game wouldn't have been scattered all across the platter forcing the head to be jumping all over the place.
What's the first song?
Sounds very nostalgic
+Lovasz Harmony, from the original Rayman.
Ah, thank you :D
DaLand-DownUnder
Can you please tell me the real Name of that bluetooth Pizza i cant find it ;__;
Keeping in mind there a lot of variables coming into play
The condition you kept your old drive in terms of fragmentation, the difference in capacity means that data is potentially physically stored in slower portions of the platter, the speed of the platter (5400RPM vs 7400RPM)
whos also in the 360p club?^^
You're almost at 100.000 subs buddy!, keep up the good work !
Hi i know this is an older entry !
But it helped me out with cyberpunk 2077 i had on an external hdd(2-3years older than the newer 4tb)The game now launches n loads pretty much up to 2-3 times faster(that is alot in this game)
Im totaly new to pc(played nes 8bit+c64 amiga vic 20 and the older 80s-90s consoles,then nothing before covid)So i have to learn about stuff like this in my old/older age(47 soon 48)so just a big thank you for this older video on youtube!!
I love how you put Rayman music in your videos. It's my favourite video game soundtrack!
So proud of you James, your most recent upload really hit home.
The sound tracks in your videos are just awesome!!
Whoa, I didn't realize people had to wait for Fallout 4 load times... I just hit a macro key and the game launches within a couple seconds. Its been a while since I've played, but I think its around 2 seconds to load. Skyrim is so fast moving between areas (like entering a cave or back out into skyrim), it doesn't even show the load screen, it just goes blank for around 1/3 second and you can keep on going like nothing happened.
SSD's are awesome and I vowed to never again use a mechanical drive. Then after I spent as much on my SSD as my R9 270 and filled up the 240GB, I was forced to use an 80GB IDE drive and bought a $3 IDE to SATA 3 adapter so I could push my videos and documents over to the whopping 4 mb/s drive (SSD bench-marked at 460-480 mb/s). Granted, that was a last minute fix for under $5 since I have a bunch of old IDE drives. But its so slow I named it "The Ancient IDE drive (E:)"... You can't get much slower or retro than that.
HDD's are still relevant I guess, getting a 3TB SSD would set you back a lot of cash, but a mechanical drive could be found new for around $100.
Although SSD's are getting very cheap, even 1 month later it dropped 25% for the same exact drive I bought. I still don't regret it though, its so fast.
I just recently bought a new 2 TB Seagate barracuda to complement my previous and 3 year old (still running strong) 2 TB Seagate barracuda. Just a 3 year difference but the new one is lighter weight, and much quieter, and both read and write speeds are improved(from about 170 MB/s read to over 200!). I've yet to try to update the firmware of the older drive though...but Raid 0 speeds are very good!
Your music is always a nostalgia trip. 10/10
Did you clone the blue drive to the black or simply install fresh copies of the games onto the black drive? If the latter, then you could have skewed your test results. A fresh install allocates space for the game so that it is optimized and would run better even on the old blue drive.
Putting TLOU into that OG PS3 is a really ballsy move
Awesome, a video where someone went straight to the point and showed the load times. Thanks!!!
This actually surprised me somewhat, with how much of an improvement you get.
i screamed like crazy when i saw ghg in my subscription page
Awesome vid. Always get a cup of tea when I see a new video.
The Last of Us with a SSD is just a dream ^^
what's the name of the music at 1:09 ? pretty catchy tune
But a modern WD Blue from nowadays would also have much shorter loading times or not?
And also caviar black isn't produced anymore, they call them just "black" now.
I like the content you put out, everyone would overlook this but you keep things exciting :D
GTA 5 load times were significantly reduced on my laptop after I swapped out its 1 TB 5400 RPM HGST hard drive with a Samsung 850 EVO 500 GB 2.5 inch SSD.
Great video,i bought a second hand pc , and first thing i did was checked the state of the harddrive. it showed was over 5 years old so have replaced with 3 WD blue drives and very happy with load times.Looking forward to your Bioshock video ☺
Nice to hear Rayman's 'Band Land' theme at the start.
Where did the title card for "Bluetooth pizza" start? i saw it pop up on the naughty dog video. Has it been there forever like BAD WOLF and i just haven't noticed it?
Were both drives formatted and starting from scratch or are we comparing a WD Blue vs a WD Black with one having the advantage of games installed on a blank drive and the other making due with years of crap installed? Newer drives usually end up providing some speed boost regardless just because of technology advancements...that's why the new blues at 5400rpm spindle speed are still faster than their older counterparts.
Here's my drives: 2x 1TB WD Blue, 7200RPM, SATA III and 1x 500GB Toshiba laptop drive, probably 5400RPM and SATA II.
One of the WD Blues is my boot drive, so I'm replacing it with a 480GB SSD and using the 1TB drive for more data storage.
Glorious SSD master race. CARTRIDGES ARE BACK BABY!
Not sure how fair of a test this was, the two drives featured have completely different use cases and are in a completely different class. The blue series is low spin speed, low power & low cost drive. The black is built as a higher performance disk, higher spin speed, higher power, higher price, both series are still available to buy, but you should think about use case before buying a disk, if you just want massive amounts of cheap space get blue, if you want fast but dense get black, if you want 24/7 usage get red, if you want to go crazy get SSDs and stripe them together.
The load times between an old fragmented HDD with almost half of its storage space occupied could be saved by a simple defrag, no need to buy a new one unless your drive is slow no matter what.
Now SSDs are a lot cheaper :)
What are load screens?
I get less than 2 second wait on most games as I have my games installed on my SSD.
If you run games on a mechanical drive, make sure you defrag every now and then to reduce the low times by half a second or so.
WD Caviar Black is absolutely fucking insane. Load times for Fallout 4 are 8-12s on my 850 Evo
My friend has a 4TB one. It's a beast, and it's loud.
But he went full SSD not too long ago
I didn't know the WD Black provided that much of a "performance gain" over the WD Blue, makes me happy I didn't cheap out and get it.
very interesting, I didn't realize how much of a difference a faster hard drive makes. Ever since I got my SSD, I just assumed all hard drives are equally slow.
Be yourself mate. An Australian trying to sound like a cross between David Attenborough and a Seppo just sounds out of sorts
Where is the Bioshock video ? :( you said that would be next
Kinda simplistic comparison
What where the drive RPM, cache, was the drive defragged? More detail would be nice rather than just old drive full of stuff vs new drive.
How much of this could be improved by defragging instead of upgrading your hdd? The doom bench appears to be more related to fragmentation.
I find it funny all but 2 of my drives are Western Digital. I do have an old slow Toshiba drive and a Seagate but the rest are WD. In my PC I have a WD Black2 that boots my licensed copy of Windows 7 Ultimate in under 30 seconds from the 120 GB SSD side and gives me 1 TB of storage on HDD side. Second drive is a WD Scorpio Blue 500 GB that came in the machine and currently houses a licensed copy of Windows 10 Pro. External drives include a Dell badged 750 GB WD enterprise server drive, an 80 GB WD Caviar Blue, and a few other random WD drives. They all still work to this day. I do believe that 80 GB Caviar Blue is around 10 years old now yet it runs my scrap PC for things that might corrupt an OS just fine. The Toshiba and Segate drives are set up as NAS drives on my router. Figures I have the WD drives direct attached but the others are indirect. The 750 GB Dell brand server drive has 36296 hours of operation on it. That's over 4 years it has been running. Power cycle count is only 342 and half of those are from me rebooting the power supply it runs off of. There are a few reallocated sectors but the drive still works fine and functions as my backup for the whole system. I trust WD thanks to the high quality their drives have. Think about it. I have a drive that has run for over 4 years and is still good to go for plenty more. Get WD drives. They are trustworthy.
As someone mentioned earlier, these are 2 different products. Blue is ultra cheap, about £35 for 1TB & Black is a little better at about £65 - £70. It's like comparing and SSD with M.2. Pointless.
On amazon, current prices as of Showing of this vid (in USD): Western Digital Black 1TB HD=$69.99, SanDisk X400 1TB SSD = $219. Revisit in 1 year and see how much the gap has shrunk.
Seagate aint so bad, i had a 160GB IDE Seagate running in a P3 pc from 2003 all the way to 2011+. Used for my grandma.
I even have a 2TB 7200RPM Barracuda from 2012 right now and it crashed many times yet it still works despite unrecoverable sectors i play games on it (a litle stuttery though on Windows as Linux is better optimized).
0:42 Somethings wrong here.
Also what about boot times?
everybody is talking about not being fair on the blue vs. The black hdd... but as i think, it is good because:
1) usually The "home PC" is built with cheap parts > so an upgrade like this should make it a faster PC
2) The SSD is very expensive and if you like to have A LOT of games like i do, the hdd becomes the best choise.
one thing he didn't try is RAID...
but well i liked this vídeo
you actually showed how much it costed in swedish kr. i wish more people were like you.
you are hitting 100k soon, so deserved
the more likely cause for the slower load times is the fragmentation of the old hard drive compared to the new one
I feel like this comparison would've been better if you completely formatted the WD Blue drive, or duplicated the files on the Blue drive and put them on the Black drive, so they were bother on even playing grounds. Throwing an SSD into the comparisons would have also been interesting.
I have the 2.0TB black. Apart from it being very noisy ( for a modern drive anyways ), I cannot recommend this HD enough. Its super fast. I would say that it isn't suited for storing movies and documents etc, you would be wasting your money if you were to buy it for this job, but for loading programs and games from it ... its ideal.
There's something I need to know. Was this a cloned disk with the same data on it? because if it was a fresh install, then... you must account for many things such as... fragmentation, place on the hdd where the game is stored (if it is further from the center, read times are slower) and of course read speeds of the hard drive itself.
Upgrading the hard drive will give a boost but never so significant as the boost an ssd can give. Also, the speed at which you can read data can also be bottlenecked by the CPU at being process and sent to the VGA's Vram or the actual system RAM.
In my case, I have an SSD for the boot drive and separate drives for everything else as the boot drive is only 60GB. For instance my games have a dedicated drive, and so does my user data.
It works quite well, in fact its kind of hard to notice the files are on the separate drives...
You missed a lot of important information.
First being the specs, RPMs, Cache, and interface (SATA II vs SATA III). The most important information being RPMs. In fact, if only the RPMs are the same, I dare say there should be almost no different in loading times regardless of age... assuming the below is taken care of.
The nature of how a HDD works. Data closer to the start of the driver can easily be twice as fast as data at the end of the drive physically. Which is a possibility when we deal with an older drive (higher chance of data at the end) and a new drive (higher chance of data at the start). This could have been alleviated by simply reformatting the drive.
A used drive also has to contend with fragmentation, where as on a new one fragmentation is minimal. A heavy defragment cycle would help, but as before, this could also been alleviated by simply reformatting the drive.
This is important because you don't want to trick yourself into thinking the drive is actually faster. The best of the best drives will suffer from fragmented data and data on slower parts of the drive in as little as a week from heavy downloading and installing.
Also, as a cherry on top, a peek into the SMART readout on something like HD Tune Pro would be valuable. Is the drive slow because there are a lot of errors? HD Tunes default bench mark also displays the difference in speed across the drive. If both drives have an average of 90MBs (which is typical of ANY 7200 RPM drive) then what happens to load times after a reformat.
Lots of questions, and rather interesting ones. Would love to see a part 2 with these addressed, would be fun to see.
can I use an HP Compaq 5800 to to make it into into a budget gaming PC like with the Dell Optiplex?