32MB Cache?

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brisk

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 5, 2004
Messages
219
Hello,
I did a search on this topic and nothing came up.

I was wondering is there a noticeable difference between the 16MB and the 32MB cache hard drives?

Mostly I am comparing between the Seagate 7200.10 and 7200.11.

Is the 32MB cache worth selling/returning my current 16MB cache for?

Let me know.

Thanks in advance!
 
The Seagate 7200.10s generally get 60-70MBps, whereas the 7200.11s get 70-80MBps, so in some cases the speed improvement may make a very noticeable difference, but I really doubt it is worth dumping your .10 for a .11, if you can return it, then you may want to...... I cache size has some to do with the speed improvement, but the .11s are a second generation and the drive's mechanical performance is up a lot....
 
brisk said:
Is the 32MB cache worth selling/returning my current 16MB cache for?
Click to expand...
Depends on the amount of disposable income and how your utility function w.r.t. HDD performance. If I had a recent drive (7200.10, WD xxKS, etc.) then I would not replace it for a 32MB cache drive, unless I needed more space or had other reasons for buying another HDD in the first place.
 
thanks for the reply.

i won't be running these in any type of RAID setup.
I heard that there is a greater chance of hard drive failure if i do RAID0 with not that noticeable of a performance gain. (please correct me if I am wrong)

It is just that there is a deal for the 320gb which are 7200.10 and i was going to get two of or i was just going to skip that deal and get the 500gb 7200.11 if the speed was noticeable because of the cache.

any suggestions?

thanks again in advance.
 
If you already have the 16MB .10s, and your only expense is $5-10 for shipping then it might be worth it.... otherwise, the minimal performance increase won't come close to the cash burned! :cool:

RAID0 does have a ~moderate increase in performance, and that would positively blow away anything a 16MB->32MB cache increase could offer. And you're completely right, RAID0 makes the likelihood of data loss increase with each drive that's added.
 
thanks for the reply.
i heard that RAID0 only sees a big improvement in performance in benchmark tests, but in real world apps and games there is only like a 4% increase in performance if i recall correctly. i may be totally wrong though.
 
brisk said:
thanks for the reply.
i heard that RAID0 only sees a big improvement in performance in benchmark tests, but in real world apps and games there is only like a 4% increase in performance if i recall correctly. i may be totally wrong though.
Click to expand...

Well, that is the $64k question. It really depends whom you ask. Some people will say that RAID-0 provides noticeable performance improvement in day-to-day operation, others claim that it does not. There have been tons of benchmarks runs with stopwatches etc...

To me, it appears that the whole discussion has eroded to a religious thing: Either you believe that RAID-0 rocks or you believe that RAID-0 sucks. I tend more to the latter crowd, but I hope that my post was objective and abstract enough not to provide fuel for another flame war.
 
RAID-0 feels like it speeds up performance. It does increase full-out bandwidth in the form of write and read speed. The fact is, benchmarks are synthetic and will always show an increase. The dynamics of data read and write from a magnetic platter are far different when the files are fragmented, however.
 
I use RAID 0 for my video editing, at 300MB/s I need it!

RAID 1 feels like you are being robbed, I have about 6gig of drives but duu to no other RAID type on my board I have only 3GB of drive space
 
Jay_oasis said:
I use RAID 0 for my video editing, at 300MB/s I need it!
Click to expand...

This is one application where R0 is very useful. When you need a lot of bandwidth and seek time is not an issue. R0 was VERY useful the last time I used it (2001), as the IDE drives I had could only do 40MB/sec, bumping up to 80MB/sec was a huge performance leap.
 
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