HDD cache

[REGIreaper]

What is the difference in all the cache's you get
8Mb , 16Mb , 32Mb

Well there's a huge price difference , what else .

All my HDD's are 32Mb

 

[SYNERGY]

Basically- the higher the better/speedier for you.

 

[killadoob]

Why is a 16mb cache better though, what is faster, transfer rates or seek time or what?

 

[Schwartz]

the higher the number the faster it is... it just allows through more "stuff" at once

 

[Drake2007]

It would be write's to the drive that speed improves.
It lets your PC write to the drive in larger chunks, of multiple files even, once instead of having to wait for it to be mechanically stored on the platters for each file.

 

[Conradl]

The question of Cache is a little misleading. RAID controllers and SANS for example have proper cache, so read and write operations are performed to cache and then written to physical disk. Not having to actually read/write to physical disk speeds up IO. This type of cache generally ranges from 256MB to 1TB!

The type of memory on an HDD is actually a Buffer, and because of its small size does not offer the same benefits of the cache mentioned above. This buffer is used for sequencing write operations and pre-fetching read operations (in the case of NCQ). So the benefits would be limited to those operations, the real world difference between 16 and 32MB would be very limited....