16meg cache..... benefits?

[hmmyah]

I found a 300gig hd with 16megs of cache, whats the benefits of such a large cache? or maybe a better question, where will i see performance boosts from this hd?

 

[primea]

Link? There's a big dofference between the 2MB and 8MB cache ... so there should be an improvement to 16MB

 

[hmmyah]

I found it when browsing the HDs at zipzoomfly.
link

 

[Yogi]

You are probably talking about the Maxtor MaXLine III. Yes the 16mb buffer does help performance. You can find a review from Anand here.

:edit: Replied a second too late. Yup, that's the drive I'm talking about. Check the review.

 

[AMD T-type]

hmmm, a drive that lasts 11.5 decades?

im in ! !!

 

[unhappy_mage]

i personally think hard drive caches should be kept to a minimum. any modern OS (read: linux) does much better at caching things than the hard drive can. It knows where the next read request is going to come from, and does some re-ordering of the queue to get better read/write performance. drive caches are fine at 8 megs. You might see some difference under windows, but i'd be surprised to see any difference in linux. you're prolly a windows luser tho, so go for it

 

[Snugglebear]

Windows also uses filesystem caching and stores a pretty good chunk of the tree in memory. The OS really shouldn't be involved in reordering the inflight operation queue since the drives do it themselves and the status updates on each operation are completely unreliable because of how the drives work.

 

[Yogi]

i personally think hard drive caches should be kept to a minimum. any modern OS (read: linux) does much better at caching things than the hard drive can. It knows where the next read request is going to come from, and does some re-ordering of the queue to get better read/write performance. drive caches are fine at 8 megs. You might see some difference under windows, but i'd be surprised to see any difference in linux. you're prolly a windows luser tho, so go for it

The advantage of the hard drive cache is that it has much faster access to the drive than system memory does. OS cache and hard drive cache are completely different things that can work together just fine. In a ideal situation, data will be cached by the hard drive to avoid the time wasted during seeks, and then it will be cached by the OS if it will be used multiple times. Any modern OS will benefit greatly from higher hard drive cache.

Linux and Windows would both benefit equally from the MaXLine's cache, except, of course, when being used as servers, as the MaXLine has been optimised for single-user desktop performance, and server users should go with SCSI drives optimised for multiuser work.