Western Digital Caviar Black and RE4 2TB Drives Review

Game Level Load Times

We timed the loading of three games, Far Cry 2, Resident Evil 5 and Wolfenstein, with these parameters:

  • Each game was installed from Steam to prevent optical disk access during timing. 
  • We started Steam before testing. 
  • We defragmented each drive before testing. 
  • We timed games immediately after they were freshly installed. 
  • We cleared all pre- and superfetch data in between each test. 
  • Timing started when we double-clicked the game's icon in the Game Explorer folder. 
  • Timing ended when the first logo, of any sort, appeared on screen. 
  • We performed each game loading test three times and averaged the results for each drive's performance score.

 

Game Level Load Times
Get Your Game On

The games each loaded in less than 25 seconds, some faster than others--and some drives spit the game code out faster than others. It seems that the CPU utilization hit the Caviar Black suffered in the previous test didn't whack its load times--it loaded all three games faster than the other two drives.


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