Does HDD speed play any role in game performance?

Hey guys. (Hardware gurus)

It might be a total noob question but I was wondering if HDD has any effects on gaming performance? Like does a low speed one bottleneck the game to have full performance?

Only load times.

If you play MMO's that stream data from the HDD it can effect performancewhen turning fast and high speed travel. It's not worth worrying about... unless you got a really old drive that uses IDE.

Another thing is to... A lack of RAM can also cause games to cache on the drive. It would be best to upgrade your RAM then it would be to upgrade your HDD.

Game files are loaded from the hard drive into memory, then the game references the data in the memory. This all happens during those wonderful "loading" screens.

So the only thing that will improve with a faster hard drive will be the load times.