8 mb cache?

[Millow]

what is cache? what does it do? is 8mb really worth the (small) amount of money over 2 mb?

 

[infin|ty]

I'm not possitive about the first part lmao but I do know that the extra money is worth it for the extra 6mb of cache.

 

[pbXassassinX1524]

more cache = better

 

[mulebennett]

A place to store something more or less temporarily. Web pages you’ve visited are stored in your browser’s cache directory on your hard disk . Likewise, ISPs cache web pages which speeds up access times for users, as the page is being read from the cache memory and not downloaded from the actual web site.

basically it's a place on the hard drive that stores info that you repeatedly visit, making it quicker and easier to access them over and over.

for the nominal price difference, you'll see a 25% hd performance improvement (or so i've heard).

 

[infin|ty]

Originally posted by mulebennett
basically it's a place on the hard drive that stores info that you repeatedly visit, making it quicker and easier to access them over and over.

for the nominal price difference, you'll see a 25% hd performance improvement (or so i've heard).

That's what I thought, wasnt exactly sure though.

 

[jagec]

personally I don't think it's a huge performance difference, but the 8 MB cache ones aren't too much more expensive so there's no sense cheaping out...

 

[Ice Czar]

you have caches all the way down the line from the L1 and L2 caches on the CPU, through the system memory (RAM) which caches data the CPU might need to the HDDs cache (and if your running a RAID Card it might have an additional layer of cache), the difference here is the HDDs cache is more "informed" about the HDDs characteristics than the larger system caches

How much faster is a drive with 8 MB of buffer than an otherwise identical 2 MB buffer model?

roughly speaking the difference (if actually employed by the ap)
could be as much as 30% increase in performance

definately worth it for the money

System Cache Overview
the HDD cache
a good example in graphs about how caches look in filesystem I\Os
http://www.iozone.org/ more > pdf