Hard Drive Buffer Sizes

mercurial

mercurial

MyBB Legend
Joined
Jun 12, 2007
Messages
40,900
Reaction score
2,693
Location
/\/¯¯¯¯¯\/\
So i bought a 160gb seagate hard drive earlier, as i will be re-installing my OS. this drive will just be for apps. I asked the guy if it has 16mb cache and he says yes. i come home, i google the drive with the number on it and i find out it only has 2mb cache. so before i go over there and bash his brains out, i need to know whether or not there is a difference in performance, when comparing a 8mb cache drive to a 2mb cache drive.
 
thanks. i'm so glad you're online cos i am confused at this moment. i googled many sites and most of them said that you don't really see a speed difference at all.
 
mercurial said:
thanks. i'm so glad you're online cos i am confused at this moment. i googled many sites and most of them said that you don't really see a speed difference at all.
Click to expand...

I've also heard conflicting stories... It would make sense that an 8MB cache drive would be marginally quicker than the 2MB version, though. :)
 
hard drive cache does make a difference.
but with anything else, dont expect much performance increase if there are any other bottle-necks. ie. cpu/pc memory.

best option is to get 2X 80 gig HDD 8 meg cache and RAID them (0)
 
kevinswan007 said:
hard drive cache does make a difference.
but with anything else, dont expect much performance increase if there are any other bottle-necks. ie. cpu/pc memory.

best option is to get 2X 80 gig HDD 8 meg cache and RAID them (0)
Click to expand...

thanks, but i don't want 2 x 80gb's. 1 x 160 is what i want.
 
2 x 80 gig in raid is a 160 hdd merc :)

u will not find a faster drive than this unless you raid 2 raptors :)
 
+1 Killadoob. But raptors also have an unfair advantage in terms of speed and seek times. "Unfair" cause I don't have one.

Merc, go m03r someone. It will make a difference in your performance. And even if you don't see the performance, you've already paid for it anyways.
 
kevinswan007 said:
hard drive cache does make a difference.
but with anything else, dont expect much performance increase if there are any other bottle-necks. ie. cpu/pc memory.

best option is to get 2X 80 gig HDD 8 meg cache and RAID them (0)
Click to expand...

I think by far the greatest bottleneck is fragmentation. Once you fill that drive up more than halfway and start deleting and copying more stuff on you'll find that your performance will drop a lot, 2MB, 8MB or 16MB.
Oh and AV software :( ... that is the second HD performance killer, especially if you run apps with many dlls off the drive.
 
Last edited:
15k FTW! I've heard that cache makes a difference, but I would guess (as with everything) that it depends on what you do... My 320GB WD Caviar drive has a 32MB cache...

And defragging is hardly worth it. Maybe a slightly quicker start up time, but not really worth it IMO.
 
Last edited:
well i'm gonna take it back. either they give me what i want and if they don't have it i'm demanding my money back.

/strokes baseball bat
 
Definitely take it back. I think it makes a fairly large difference. Plus I think most of the speed gains made in the last few years result from upping the cache. 8mb could have been excused, but getting 2mb when promised 16mb is definitely in m03r territory IMO.
 
From 8Mb to 16Mb, or even 16 to 32, it isn't a very big difference. But with 2mb cache I'd definitely take the drive back, especially when it's meant to be 16. :eek:

Those sales guys don't know what they're talking about half the time and they'll rather say yes than "I don't know".
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X