There are some people who believe that a computer's hard drive is the bottleneck to a computer. That is, that a hard drive's performance is what is slowing down computers today. The truth is that it is some ways and isn't in other ways. The hard drive obviously will not slow down gaming performance a whole lot but it will effect load times in computer games and computer programs.

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If you have ever had a full hard drive or one that is about to be full you can probably testify of a slow computer because of it. This is true because computers need extra space for what is called virtual memory. This is hard drive space for the computer that acts like computer memory RAM when someone has many programs open and the RAM is fully utilized. When RAM is all used up the computer will start to use the hard drive as memory.

In many computers the bottleneck which slows down the computer is the RAM. Not necessarily the speed of the RAM but the amount of it. A higher capacity of RAM promises that you can have more programs open at once and not get slowed down by the hard drive (virtual memory) if the RAM is full of data.

The hard drive does slow down your computer's load time when you start up your computer, start a program, or start a game. Basically, anything that has to be loaded from the hard drive onto memory takes a long time due to the hard drive speed. Have you ever noticed that a computer program starts up faster the second time you load it with in a short period of time. This is because the program is now in memory or on the RAM. The RAM is much faster at loading programs that the hard drive but all of the data for that program must first be loaded from the hard drive.

What can you do about a slow hard drive? How can you improve computer load times? The easiest way at the moment but the more expensive way is to buy a new type of hard drive that uses a different type of memory. Traditional hard drive have moving parts and can fail. However, today people are buying computers with solid state drives which use flash memory. Flash memory is much more reliable because it has no moving parts. The reading and loading times are much shorter than a traditional hard drive because there are no moving parts that require seek time.

The solid state drives are more expensive but do offer better performance. As of now Intel's SSD is perhaps one of the fasted drives out. In some cases it can be five times faster than the traditional hard drive.

Not only that but solid state drives and internal drives in general can be linked together to act as one drive which increases speed again. This feature is called raiding or raid. When two hard drives or SSDs are raided it does not mean twice as fast but it does mean it will be faster than a single hard drive.

Many computer servers use this feature to improve the speed at which data is accessed. The older hard drives with moving parts would sometimes fail and that meant that there were only pieces of data on the other hard drives that became useless. The chances of a solid state drive failing are far slim in comparison.

As you can see the hard drive does slow down your computer's load time when programs are first accessed. However it does not slow down other parts of your computer such as a game being played. Unless it is accessing data from the hard drive to load a new map. This is one of the big bottlenecks in computers but is not necessarily a problem for different aspects of speed that the computer has.