Question Why are we still stuck with hard drives with 128MB or 256MB cache?

[jamesdsimone]

Been shopping hard drives for my NAS's and I was wondering why don't hard drives have 1GB or 2 GB cache or more? Large drives have 256MB? That has barely increased from 32MB decades ago. DDR4 is going for less than 5 dollars/GB retail. It would only cost a dollar or so to put that much cache on a hard drive. I assume cache uses the same kind of memory.

 

[Tech Junky]

Because no one has demanded it be increased. If you want fast then you go SSD or NVME. I get 400MB/s off my setup with spinners in raid 10.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

It would only cost a dollar or so to put that much cache on a hard drive.

But then you'd have to add capacitors so you can flush to disk in the event of a power out. So the BOM goes up.

The performance segment has been lost to SSDs for 10+ years, and every $ you can shave off is a good thing for $/GB. People simply care about capacity, not performance.

 

[Tech Junky]

capacity, not performance

I look at both and it depends on what the use is for.

Capacity matters for both short and long term storage.

Speed matters for immediate use.

I run dual NVME drives in my laptop for speed and on my server I run an os NVME and 5x spinners for storage. I get SSD speeds from the spinners by multiplying the controllers speed per pair using raid.