Map Load Tests

I chose Battlefield 2 simply for its legendary map loading times. 'Strike at Karkand' seems to be one of the heavier maps and, thus, was chosen for this test. Again, the Barracudas destroy the ordinary drive. However, there is not much of gain as far as the different RAID configurations. I find this interesting as map loading is where we should see the most significant gain in gameplay from these hard drives. By themselves, they smoke ordinary drives, but there is minimal gain from the RAID configurations.

FarCry is another game that has been heralded as having long map loads. Significant gains in times are shown by the data. There is even a decent gain in the RAID-0 and RAID-5 configurations. In fact, the RAID-0 and RAID-5 setups more than halve the time it took to load the maps on the ordinary 80GB drive. Very impressive. Why there was no gain in BF2 between the RAID setups and there was in FarCry is up for speculation. Obviously there is a difference in the games as it relates to map loading, but that difference is unknown.