Hard disk buffer size important?

Question

Level 1

0 points

Hard disk buffer size important?

Hard disks are now sporting 16MB buffers. Does this blow the socks off a similar sized disk with an 8MB buffer or is the difference marginal?

1.8MHz G5 970fx : 768MB RAM + 80GB HD Mac OS X (10.4.5) (bought on eBay not yet my possession.)

Posted on Mar 28, 2006 2:01 PM

Reply

Answer 1

mbean

Level 4

1,250 points

Mar 28, 2006 4:14 PM in response to Sebadee

Unfortunately - just having a larger cache does not make a hard drive significantly faster. See the AMUG review of the Seagate 8MB vs the 16MB model here for details:

http://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/reviews/articles/seagate16/

Reply

Answer 2

Mar 28, 2006 4:18 PM in response to Sebadee

It depends on what your doing. For everyday tasks, you probably won't see a difference. If you have lots of seeking for video or audio production, it would help.

The reason for drive cache is to be able to quickly burst data to the computer (at the speed of the interface) while the hard drive has time to seek. Drives are only able to read/write at 50-80MB/s while SATA interfaces support over twice that. The more cache, the more data that can be stored without the need to seek. It also acts as a buffer if the other drives on your system aren't the same speed.

From the tests I've seen, the new 7200 rpm drives with 16MB of cache perform comparable to the Raptor 10k rpm drives in most tests. The cache really helps.

Reply