The Best Gaming Hard Drives for 2015

The Best Gaming Hard Drives for 2015

"While solid state drives are all the rage right now, traditional mechanical hard drives are still a great affordable storage option. And, even if you are going to get a solid state drive, it’s a good idea to get a traditional hard drive to support it. In this article I’m going to go over the best hard drive options for your gaming computer."

Your hard drive isn’t going to have the hugest impact on your gaming experience. However, they are still extremely important as they hold all of the important data, programs, and applications that are on your computer.

As far as gaming goes, the only area where hard drives will make a difference is in the time it takes to load your game. Although, most gamers typically also have large amounts of music and videos.

Some gamers even record their own videos. If that is the case, then the size of your hard drive is going to be extremely important.

I usually recommend an HDD with 1TB of storage space. This gives you plenty of space and it’s fairly affordable. If you’re working with a budget, then you’ll have to consider going with a smaller HDD and upgrading to more storage later.

In any case, you should look to get an HDD with a speed of 7200RPM. This will give you  good results in game load time. If you’re working with a huge budget, you might want to consider getting an SSD, and if you have an unlimted budget, a 10,000RPM HDD like the WD Velociraptor. You can also take it a step further and get multiple HDDs and run them in RAID configuration for best results.

In this post, I will go over the best gaming hard drives in 2015 at various price ranges for to accommodate the budget for your upcoming build. I’ve broken down the categories into four different price ranges: hard drives under $50, hard drives between $50-$100, hard drives between $100-$200, and hard drives over $200.

I only chose one hard drive for each price range and while there are definitely some other worthy HDDs in these price ranges, I felt these offered the best returns for PC gamers.

The Best Gaming Hard Drive Under $60

Seagate Barracuda 320 GB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s Internal Bare Drive

Best Gaming Hard Drives 2013If you’re building on a budget, one area where you can save a little bit of money is to go with a smaller hard drive. Fortunately, for under $50 you can land yourself a 320GB Seagate Barracuda internal hard drive. It operates at 7200RPM, so the only difference between this HDD and one you’d find in a high-end gaming machine is the size. If you need more room, you can simply add another hard drive in the future.

Seagate Barracuda 320GB 7200RPM Specs

320GB
7200RPM
16MB Cache
3.5″ Form Factor
Two Year Warranty
Serial ATA-600
Holding capacity: 100,000 photos/5,300 hours of music/320 hours of video/80 hours of movies

The Best Gaming Hard Drive Between $60 and $100

WD Blue 1 TB Desktop Hard Drive: 3.5 Inch, 7200 RPM

Best Gaming Hard Drives 2013A full 1TB of hard drive space is enough to match the needs of any gamer. And, coming in at under $100, this 7200RPM Western Digital HDD is the sweet spot for mid-to-high-end gaming computers. Now if you’re looking to do a lot of video editing, you might want to get the 2TB or 3TB version of this hard drive. Otherwise, this HDD will give you everything you need.

WD 1TB Blue 7200RPM Specs

1TB
7200RPM
64MB Cache
3.5″ Form Factor
Two-year limited warranty
SATA III
Lifetime Warranty
Holding capacity: 320,000 photos/16,660 hours of music/1,000 hours of video/250 hours of movies

Complete List: http://goo.gl/vy0rsh