Disk -- Because of the limited page fault activity, disk I/O bandwidth would be minimally impacted The moral of this story is that fragmentation is a good and necessary thing. Well, that depends. Now in other aspects it can. To keep your PC’s hard drive working at maximum efficiency, it should be regularly defragmented. Using a faster disk, such as an SSD, will typically give you better read and write performance compared to an older HDD, but how does this affect PC gaming? Some SATA II and later hard disk drives support staggered spin-up, allowing the computer to spin up the drives in sequence to reduce load on the power supply when booting. Such a feature greatly improves disk performance. When you load a compressed file, the CPU has to do more work decompressing it. Two major factors that impacts computer performance related to the hard disk drive are how the file is/files are scattered across the hard drive (known as fragmenting) and the location on the drive. The faster the platters of hard disk spin, the less time the hard drive will take to pull upon a certain data. The only disk based factor (along with actual drive performance) that would affect performance is how much fragmented your drive is. In fact frame rates are hardly effect your frame rates. Spyware and viruses can be very harmful to a computer's overall performance, and although virus scanners and other utility programs can help to remove these malicious items, they are not always successful. I use an utility called "WinContig". On a computer with a fast CPU but a slow hard drive, reading a compressed file might actually be faster. Freeing up disk space does not speed up computers, but reduces file fragmentation chances. The hard disk performance directly affects everything else on the computer and is therefore the weakest link. [45] Most hard disk drives today support some form of power management which uses a number of specific power modes that save energy by reducing performance. TLDR: It depends If we are talking the difference in frame rates of a 5K rpm drive vs 7.2K rpm drive then no. However, reformatting a hard drive deletes all files on a computer, including the harmful ones, and returns the system to peak performance. This can affect your computer's overall speed, since the computer's pretty much just waiting on data while those platters spin, regardless of the speed of the computer… There's a chance your page file is largely fragmented (depending on when you last defragmented, which is best done monthly), and also that your game data is all over the disk. However, that compressed file is smaller on the disk, so your computer can load the compressed data from disk faster. The only disk based factor ( along with actual drive performance ) that would affect performance how... 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