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Query and advice needed on Hard Drive Selection

R

RickXu

Junior Member
Hello all,

I am a newbie here, can you tell me what is Cache 8MB used for in HD like in Western Digital series? how faster is a 8M cache one than a normal 2M one?

Also my 20G 7200 rpm Maxtor drive just died 3 days ago, used it for two years. Now I have a 7200 40 G IBM deskstar on my computer, used it for nearly one year and sometimes I feel it is slow. like the screen will free for several seconds or you have to wait for several seconds before the IE window can be launched. I just bought a GeForce 3 Ti200 Video card, under 200/450 clock, it is not stable (I mean the computer/screen will freeze and I have to restart the computer, really annoying) if I run NFS 5 or FIFA 2002. Now I am running it in safe mode 175/400, fine.

Though my computer is not used for server, I used it extensively, expecially in summer around 12-15 hours per day.
I am looking for a reliable 60G+ HD, and I need your advice. Which one is better/reliable/price?

My computer main config:

Athlon 1.2 Ghz
512 pc2100 Crucial DDR
Epox 8k7a
Liteon DVD and CDRW
Gainward Geforce 3 Ti200
IBM 40G 7200 HD

Thanks a lot for your help.
 
If you are looking to invest in a good hard drive, the Western Digital 80gb 800JB 8mb cache drive is your best bet. A very good performer, beats out all of the other 80gb IDE 7200rpm drive, and price isn't that bad either. Read the reviews at www.storagereview.com on the WD 800JB, it really is an excellent drive. Many people here will recommend the same thing.
 
As Tom's Hardware says:

8 MB Cache - A Winning Tool

Some of you may wonder how this cache memory is used. Generally, it works like the cache memory of a CPU: it is a fast buffer, faster than the actual device (this is the drive logic, in case the processor or the memory interface becomes the bottleneck). The practical use of these caches is determined by complex algorithms.

The cache algorithm usually knows the requests that it has to process. If some access wants specific data, the drive logic may anticipate that more accesses will ask for this product. In order to avoid reading from the hard drive several times, the logic will put this data into the cache memory, so that the drive will be able to handle future requests immediately. Another smart move of cache algorithms would be to read some additional data that is usually requested afterwards.

Reading data from the cache memory is much faster than going the troublesome way through the physical hard drive. Here, the burst transfer rate is the limiting factor (see benchmark section).

As you can imagine, the efficiency of such a cache memory highly depends on the algorithm that is used, as well as the cache size. The more data is cached, the better the chance for cache-hits, and performance will increase.

Here is the WD 1200JB Review
 
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