[-relk-]

Would there be a big difference in a 8mb cache and a 16mb cache on a hard drive. And what seems to be the most popular hard drive company that is bought?

 

[Xaine99]

• For your first question, HDD cache is basically a high speed "holding area" for file transfers. Here's a quote on it:

Quote:

A cache is used to speed up data transfer and may be either temporary or permanent. Memory and disk caches are in every computer to speed up instruction execution and data retrieval and updating. These temporary caches serve as staging areas, and their contents are constantly changing.

If you do things that require access to multiple items consistantly, like a game with many load screens, or video editing, etc... you'll notice an increase in those load/transfer speeds ever so slightly. (in my opinion)

• For your second question, here is a link to a review of 22 hard drives from multiple manufacturers: http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/09/27/round/

Hope this helps you out!
Xaine99

 

[briank]

16MB does seem to give a slight performance benefit in most sites reviews. Not as big as the 2MB to 8MB jump, so it may be hard to notice. I wouldn't let the cache size alone decide your purchase. Most of the 16MB drives tend to be top performers though, but more because of the leading edge capacity, not their cache size. There are 8MB drives that keep up just fine with the 16MB drives.

 

[horkan]

yeh i think mine is a 16mb cache on it and it seems to load up fairly fast my pc is fast too so, i dunno if you have a lot of ram you wont notice it i think