PS3 HD upgrade - Throughput or Access Time, which is more important

Flaccus

I just bought a Samsung 2.5" 500gig 5400rpm notebook drive which I am thinking of putting into my PS3.

Toms Hardware recently reviewed this drive and found it gave the best transfer rates of any notebook drive winning in the read/write throughput tests, but was also the poorest on access time coming in last, but really only 0.5-1ms less then competing 320gig and 500gig drives.

"Samsung breaks a throughput record by getting close to 80 MB/s with the HM500LI. However, it also reached a negative record in the access time tests with a slow 19 ms."

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/500gb-notebook-hdd,1960-5.html

So which gives bigger benefit for PS3 and which is more important :

Would faster access mean faster loading games ?

Or

Is thoughput more important.....with higher throughput, woudln't those huge game installs go quicker ?

Polar101

I wouldn't notice differences of a few .0001's of a second in access times on the PS3 myself. The PS3 disk controller is SATA/150 so SATA/300 drives won't do much of a difference.

I'd say size matters (TM), and whether it is 5400 or 7200rpm.. other than that, noticing any difference might be difficult.

I'm quite happy with my cheap-o Samsung 160 gig disk on the PS3 myself.

Flaccus

The Samsung being SATA/3GB and the PS3 having a disk controller which does not support this speed has no bearing on peformance though (including access times). The disk controller speed is simply a measure of the sata interface speed and not an actual measurement of the drives physical speed which is in fact limited by the drives mechanics. You will always be bottlenecked by the drives speed and not the interface by which it is connected to the board. The 500GIG Samsung is very fast in reading and writing due to the platter design and not the sata interface, and hits around 80MB/SEC which is still within the SATA/1.5GB specs of the PS3.

I've probably answered my own quesiton here, in that the drive should benefit in doing large game installs due to the fact it has excellent read/write speeds above other notebook drives, but will probably be not so good when loading games/new levels due to the less then stellar access times. I suppose having faster install times is better as it does irritiate me how long it takes for the PS3 to install demos and copy files across from the disc when installing full games. And I guess I can wait that extra 2 seconds for my games to load.

Varik

he hdd is not the limiting factor in install times the blu ray is,

Flaccus

not if its a big ass demo u downloaded