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8MB vs. 16MB Cache on SATA Hard Drives

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pulsedrive

Senior member
I am getting ready to have to replace my Maxtor harddrive because it is on the fritz. I was looking at replacements, most likely from Seagate. I was curious if it is worth trying to get one with a 16MB Cache, will it make any difference that I can see?
 
The extra cache will help in some areas. Also, with the WD 16MB drive not really being any more expensive then competing drives, I would go with that.
 
I read the link. But somehow I am surprised at the results with and without ncq. AT results seems to convey that ncq has negligible effect (as earlier when they recommended ncq). But I have tried my system both with and without it (when trying to troubleshoot those HDD Device paging errors on bootup) and find that without ncq, my system is noticeably more sluggish and less responsive than with ncq enabled.
 
NCQ does have a mostly negative effect in single user benches. WD even goes as far to say that ncq is plain bad for desktop performance. The MaxlineIII does improve with ncq however so maxlineIII users should leave it on.

And cache size 8->16Mb cannot be used to predict performance across manufacturers. It mostly isn;t better anyway.
 
The continuous read/write speed of the HDD should NOT be affected. Almost ANY 7200 rpm HDD can read data at a speed of 30MB/sec. Therefore, the addition of 8MB will only reduce the latency by about 1/4 sec. I doubt that the average user will be able to notice the difference in a double blind test.
 
eh, i didnt really notice any uppage in performance when going from an 8mb cache drive to a 16mb cache drive.
 
Thanks for all the responses guys, I really appreciate it. I thought this would be the case (no real difference) but I wanted to make sure I wasn't mistaken before I went out and got the new one.

On another note, Do the WD Raptors really offer any real performance increases? I have heard around that really they are pretty much a waste of money.
 
Originally posted by: pulsedrive
Thanks for all the responses guys, I really appreciate it. I thought this would be the case (no real difference) but I wanted to make sure I wasn't mistaken before I went out and got the new one.

On another note, Do the WD Raptors really offer any real performance increases? I have heard around that really they are pretty much a waste of money.
Click to expand...


Waste of money? For me it was; and I think you'll find there are a lot of people divided on the Raptors (albeit different reasons) as you have probably already noticed. I had the 74GB Raptor and I wasn't impressed at all with its overall performance or noise compared to my Seagate. I ended up selling it along with my DFI mobo and replacing the drive with another Seagate. I think if you look at price performance the Raptor is still too expensive...and quite noisy.
 
While you are on the topic, I have read that you will get better perfromance by using a smaller hard drive as the primary and put most of your programs on a secondary drive.

Is this a true statement? Is it a noticable difference and would you do this for mainly a gaming machine?

Thanks

Del D
 
Originally posted by: DelD
While you are on the topic, I have read that you will get better perfromance by using a smaller hard drive as the primary and put most of your programs on a secondary drive.

Is this a true statement? Is it a noticable difference and would you do this for mainly a gaming machine?

Thanks

Del D
Click to expand...

Yeah I've heard that, too. I think the argument is that with the smaller drive it takes less time to find the file you want as opposed to the time it takes to find it on the larger drive. The logic being that you can find something more quickly in a small room than you can in a large room. But to be honest I don't know enough, or haven't read enough, to say whether that's true or not. My main drive is 160GB and my secondary, or back up, is 250GB. My 160GB Seagate replaced the 74GB Raptor I had before and I really can't say that any of my programs are loading any slower because of the bigger 160GB drive. Sometimes just a fresh install of your OS will give you a decent performance increase.

In any case I'd recommend reading as many reviews as you can and draw your conclusions from the comparative test results.
 
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