Hard Drive question....

[Tbirdkid]

Or is it overkill?

 

[DragonFire]

I say its overkill only because of price. Tho I'm sure at some point 16MB will become the norm just like 8MB is today. I dunno for sure but seems like 16MB would only really help when large amounts of data are being written to the drive.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: DragonFire
I say its overkill only because of price. Tho I'm sure at some point 16MB will become the norm just like 8MB is today. I dunno for sure but seems like 16MB would only really help when large amounts of data are being written to the drive.

Actually, the buffer is almost completely useless when reading or writing large amounts of sequential data; it just fills the buffer nearly instantly, and you spend all your time waiting on the disk anyway. It's most helpful for tasks doing lots and lots of tiny little I/Os (like database processing).

The verdict seems to be that it's not a huge step up for regular desktop use (certainly much less of one than 2MB->8MB was). Basically, if something doesn't fit in an 8MB buffer, it's probably not going to fit in a 16MB buffer either, whereas a fair number of things will fit in an 8MB buffer that won't fit in a 2MB buffer.

 

[ssvegeta1010]

Iv'e heard it is a good thing to have, but not really worth a price increase. (I dont know the price differences now)

I would simply go with 8 MB.

 

[Rhin0]

no