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Can someone explain to me 16MB Cache vs 8MB Cache on an HDD?

D

duckdown

Senior member
Hi all.

Right now in Canada, they've got Maxtor DiamondMax ATA133 16MB Cache drives on sale for only around $120CDN, which is a pretty damn good price, but I've got a couple quick questions..

1. How reliable are these drives? Maxtor always has ALOT of people saying bad things about them..

2. Why do these drives have 16MB Cache when WD or Seagate come standard with 8MB?

3. Does this count for any type of performance increase?

4. Is the Cache allocated from the original 250GB? I already know when you put a HDD in they are always considerably less in size due to the 1024 size of a GB, but will even more be missing due to all this Cache?

5. Why are they so cheap considering they have double the Cache?



If anyone could lend me a hand in answering any or all of these questions it would be GREATLY appreciated 🙂

Thanks all
 
Not to say that you might not get perfectly good performance out of a Maxtor drive but if it were me, I would stick with Seagate. They are the best drives (overall) IMO.

Unless you have some very disk intensive applications the extra cache is not going to make enough difference for you to notice.

 
well i have 2 of them in my system right now. i can tell you that the cache does make a difference. not a great big difference but enough i feel that they are worth owning. i used to boot with a western digital 8 meg cache 120GB drive and bought my first 16 meg cache maxtor and started booting with it. that is when i seen that there is something to the extra 8 meg cache. also of note is that western digital is now making a SATA drive that has 16 meg cache so there must be something to it if more are jumping on the bandwagon maxtor started. maxtor drives have always treated me well so stick with them. many here at anadtech knock maxtor all the time, for me i have had more than one western digital fail on me where none from maxtor. so do not let other talk you out of maxtor.
 
1) I've gone through many many Maxtor drives and never had a problem, including my 200GB DM+10
2) The new Seagate 7200.9 is said to have 16MB
3) I would say so, good enough that I replaced my Raptor with it
4) No
5) Maxtors are usually cheaper, it also depends on your source and how cheaply they can get it. I'm assuming NCIX?

It's a good drive. Pretty quiet too, but I find it vibrates a little more than other drives. Not a big deal though.
 
great guys, thanks alot 🙂

I think i'll probably give it a shot then..

I don't think the 7200.9 seagates are going to be in my part of Canada for some time
 
I have several 8mb HDDs of various makes, including Maxtor. My Maxtor 16mb is noticably faster than any of them. I'm not refering to artificial benchmarks either. I'm talking about actual system bootup, application loading times, etc..
 
HDD cache will continue to grow for it is almost imminent the future HDD will be totally flash memory. In fact, in the very near future we will start seeing hybrid HDD which will have GB of cache. So go ahead and get the 16 MB cache.
 
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