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Much Difference between Hard Drive 16MB Cache vs 8MB Cache?

M

marcdisa

Banned
The Western Digital I bought has 8MB instead of 16MB....how much of a difference in everyday tasks and some random gaming am I going to notice?
 
you might be hardpressed to actually notice a difference, but there will be one.

more importantly, i dont think any modern harddrive made uses an 8mb cache.

most likely you got one from several generations ago, and the data density of those platters are gonna be WAY behind what is currently available. like going from 80 gb platters to 500 gb platters.

think what that kind of change does to your sequential data transfer speed.
 
dude...they sell hard drives all over the place with 8MB Cache....I'm looking at them brand new on New Egg and Best Buy...the one I am looking at is 320GB.
 
marcdisa said:
dude...they sell hard drives all over the place with 8MB Cache....I'm looking at them brand new on New Egg and Best Buy...the one I am looking at is 320GB.
Click to expand...

it'd be more effective if you simply posted which you were looking at.
 
marcdisa said:
The Western Digital I bought has 8MB instead of 16MB....how much of a difference in everyday tasks and some random gaming am I going to notice?
Click to expand...

You can factor out the One-upmanship of those who have 16MB. 🙄

You can sleep well laddy. Functionally you would not experience any difference. 😀
 
The more cache you have the better your I/O performance, which is nice if you have an os on the drive or game.

I see absolutely no difference in large file transfer though.
 
You won't notice much of a difference. The blue series is WD's bottom tier, now, for their consumer drives. Oddly enough, the 320GB drives came out after WD's 500 GB drives, and before WD's 1 TB drives. Not sure if it's WD updated their 320 drives with newer platters. I wouldn't touch any drives with less than 500GB these days, except for mobile.
 
Mday said:
You won't notice much of a difference. The blue series is WD's bottom tier, now, for their consumer drives. Oddly enough, the 320GB drives came out after WD's 500 GB drives, and before WD's 1 TB drives. Not sure if it's WD updated their 320 drives with newer platters. I wouldn't touch any drives with less than 500GB these days, except for mobile.
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not really bottom tier. blue is mainstream, black is enthusiast, and green is power saving.
 
WD has released a few 8mb cache models recently as budget models. Do NOT rank diffrent hard drives solely by the amount of cache! There are too many other variables, and cache may be among the least important. Within same drive family, however, you can be pretty sure that more cache is better.
 
I have a similar question. I'm cobbling together a PC with some parts I have laying around. I have these drives below gathering dust. Which one is best for an operating system?

My guess would be the green drive would come in last since it has a variable RPM, and I would think the real world difference between a 8mb IDE and a 8mb SATA drive is not much. I'm not figuring in number of platters here though.

Western Digital Caviar Green WD5000AADS 500GB 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Hard Drive

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-358-_-Product

Western Digital Caviar SE WD2000JB 200GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache IDE Ultra ATA100

http://www.newegg.com/product/produc...82E16822144129

Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 500GB SATA/300 7200RPM 8MB

http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?inv...20AS-R&cat=HDD
 
Last edited:
check storagereview
in any case all recent drives are pretty fast because of data density alone. if you are seriously concerned about speed you'd buy an intel ssd or something anyways.
 
GeezerMan said:
I have a similar question. I'm cobbling together a PC with some parts I have laying around. I have these drives below gathering dust. Which one is best for an operating system?

My guess would be the green drive would come in last since it has a variable RPM, and I would think the real world difference between a 8mb IDE and a 8mb SATA drive is not much. I'm not figuring in number of platters here though.

Western Digital Caviar Green WD5000AADS 500GB 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Hard Drive

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-358-_-Product

Western Digital Caviar SE WD2000JB 200GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache IDE Ultra ATA100

http://www.newegg.com/product/produc...82E16822144129

Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 500GB SATA/300 7200RPM 8MB

http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?inv...20AS-R&cat=HDD
Click to expand...

green drives dont actually have a variable RPM. they operate at 5400 rpm.

with regard to which would be best, i dont think any in that group are particularly good for the OS.

the 200 gig is REALLLY old tech. the 500 gig green is, well, slow. the 500 gig seagate is old tech for no real reason.

go with current tech. i wonder if there's a 500 gig wd black...

generally speaking, you go with a small but fast drive for the OS, and a big but maybe slower drive as the storage drive.
 
fayd said:
while i know the aaks line got updated with 320 gb platters, i dont know anything about that line. and google seems to be failing me as well.

whatever. if you're happy with it, why bother making a post?
Click to expand...

possibly because you have no clue what your talking about???
 
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