How Much Can Hard Drive Speed Affect Gaming Performance?

Hi, I was a bit of a noob when I built my rig (still am mostly) and I cheaped out on the Hard Drive. I haven't been getting the performance I want recently and am wondering how much a slow hard drive can affect overall performance. The drive I got is a 500gb, 8mb cache, 5400 RPM, SATA 2 Western Digital Scorpio Blue. Turns out also its a notebook hard drive, and I'm using it in my desktop.... oops.

the rest of my Specs:

Dual 5770s Xfire

AMD Anthlon iix4 640 3.0 ghz

8gb RAM 1600mhz

Windows 7 64 bit

700W PSU

I hear a slow hard drive can affect load times (which I don't care about that much) and also can cause stuttering in games that stream textures or map info etc. I have been having stuttering problems in games like Battlefield 3... then again loads of people are having stuttering problems in BF3. Anyone know if this is true?

I cannot imagine the HDD would affect gaming performance that much. Have you checked the temps of your cpu and gpus while running BF3?

Ppl game on 5400 drives all the time.... We often get too caught up in numbers and go overboard. Did I choose a 5400 for my pc? Of course not, but that was because the price difference was basically none and everyone gets 7200. With that said, if you want to do anything at all invest in an ssd and after hdd prices fall more get a 1tb or 1.5tb blue or black WD.

Why would loading the next level cause the current level to slow down? That would just be bad coding on the developer's part.red12355

5400 is really crappy. if you have enough ram then there wont be much file swapping during the game (but almost always some), but this varies game to game and some games will be drastically effected by hard drive performance, such as mmo's where it is not possible to load every item of equipment in the game into ram, new textures, equipment, models etc will load from the hard drive, and make you stutter.

Big open world games like skyrim and mmos might stutter when loading new content, but in most games only load times will change