How does HD space affect speed in 3D-games?

[Guest Nanook]

Hi.

How much has the harddrive space have to do with how well a 3D game runs?

Is it due to the win-swap file? I can understand that it may have a lot to say if you have 30 kb left on your drive, but does it have any effect if you have a 200 GB harddrive, and you have lets say 4 GB free (and you never have defragmented it)?

And if it DOES have effect, then how much does it affect the speed?

[Guest Guest]

If you have 30kb left on your drive, then running any 3d game (or any other program) will llikely crash your computer from running out of memory. Otherwise, the most probable way it would affect your game is if your harddrive is soo fragmented (esp. from being full) that even the swap file cannot be contained in one spot and is spread all over your hard drive, reading/writing from it might take longer than usual.

[Bill]

If you do not have much space left, or your HD/swap file is really fragmented, it will take a LONG time to load stuff, in that case just defragment it.

If you are that low on HD space, you could buy a bigger laptop HD, burn stuff on a CD or DVD, or go out and get a nice big external HD, or buy a desktop HD and a external enclosure and make your own external HD.

You can find enclosures here:

http://www.newegg.com/app/manufactory.asp?catalog=92&DEPA=1

5.25 inch and 3.5 inch will work for desktop HDs.....

5.25 inch will fit optical drives (duh)

and the 2.5 inchers will only fit laptop HDs...

I currently have this one, http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc....-145-544&depa=1

That link should work, although after I while it might not...

Its the CompuCable 3.5"/ 5.25" FireWire + USB 2.0 External Enclosure, Model "FireXpress 525DX".