Tech-Hounds adds a second article to their quest for lag free gaming.  They explored the video and memory subsystems in teh first article, and now they move onto the hard drive.  If you are planning an upgrade because some of the newest games just don’t play smoothly, this may help determine what to buy first.
“In part 1, we concluded that if you want to play new games at the highest detai, you better be prepared to buy both a high end graphics card and at least 2 GB of memory (assuming you already have a fast enough processor). Having 2 GB of memory not only eliminates most memory related stuttering, but also offers faster load times as well. But it won’t solve all stuttering. In part 2, we take a more focused look on storage related stuttering – mostly the ones due to level loads and game saves. It’s obvious the hard drive is the bottleneck, so we threw in two 80 GB Maxtor Diamond Max Plus SATA hard drive and configure them as one 160 GB RAID array. The results we got were pretty interesting, RAID 0 do offer some tangible benefits (performance, load times and save times) but it looks like our RAID array is not fast enough to provide stutter free gaming.”

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