Eli writes in: "I see a lot of gaming websites recommend using a 10k RPM or flash0based hard drive for gaming, so I'm wondering: can I use a 7200 or even 5400 RPM hard drive for gaming on my computer?"

Your hard drive, thankfully, isn't a big limiting factor in your gaming: you can play a game with practically any speed hard drive, it's just how long you're willing to wait for a gamer to load that will limit you.

With modern games, almost everything is kept in system memory, and very little - if any - gets put in the memory swap space. So, your frame per second (how fast the games draws on screen) won't drop with a slower hard drive, but the amount of time will increase exponentially with a slower drive.

Currently, the best hard drives to use for gaming are flash-based disks. They have a nearly instant access time, and they can push out far more data than physical hard drives can. Of course, flash drives are pretty expensive.

On the other hand, physical hard drives are far cheaper, but they don't offer near the performance of their flash based cousins.

Will 7200 RPM work for gaming? Absolutely, yes. Will you be waiting for levels to load longer than a 10K RPM or flash drive? Sure - but that's basically the only difference you need to worry about.

Do you have a question you need answered? E-mail me! lordkat@gmail.com

Click here to check out How to Build a Gaming Computer for Under $1000.

Be safe,

Jason