Hard drive technical question.

[geekcomputing]

i'm going from a 2 meg catch on my hard drive to a new drive that has a 8 meg catch.

will i see any performance gains?

would it help at all w/ pc gaming?

how much difference does it make?

just curious.
Thx.

 

[Rogue4mula]

like cache on a processor, more cache on the hard drive will help to improve performance whenever something uses reads/writes dats on it!

 

[Ice Czar]

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

A good empirical example may be found by comparing Western Digital's Caviar WD2000JB (8 MB) with the WD2000BB (2 MB). As illustrated by the comparison, the 8-megabyte buffer delivers a single-user, desktop machine a 30+% performance gain. This gain goes a long way to closing the gap between 7200 RPM ATA drives and their 10,000 RPM SCSI/SATA counterparts.

The theory behind the real-world gain: Despite the gobs of main memory cache that a machine's operating system can devote to the caching of frequently accessed data, the OS sees drives as one large LBA array. The drive's buffer, coupled with its firmware, however, is familiar with the physical layout of the drive itself and can perform read-ahead and write-back optimizations that are beyond the reach of the relatively "dumb but huge" OS cache.

Note that there is little if any performance gain in multi-user/server situations. Larger buffers and intelligent firmware still can't bring their advantages to bear on these highly random accesses. Also, remember that "multi-user" is not the same thing as heavy-multitasking. Unless you have dozens of users simultaneously accessing a machine, its pattern is that of a desktop's.

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