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Hard Drive

Lee HLee H Member Posts: 1,135
Hi

Is there a noticable difference between a hard drive with 2MB cache and a hard drive with 8MB cache, for general use or gaming

Lee
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    blargoeblargoe Member Posts: 4,174 ■■■■■■■■■□
    I think so, I wouldn't say night and day but it's noticable.
    IT guy since 12/00

    Recent: 11/2019 - RHCSA (RHEL 7); 2/2019 - Updated VCP to 6.5 (just a few days before VMware discontinued the re-cert policy...)
    Working on: RHCE/Ansible
    Future: Probably continued Red Hat Immersion, Possibly VCAP Design, or maybe a completely different path. Depends on job demands...
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    garv221garv221 Member Posts: 1,914
    noticeable for me is going from 7200 to 10000 RPM.
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    PlantwizPlantwiz Mod Posts: 5,057 Mod
    If you want noticable HDD speed use SCSI Drives (15K) in a RAID.
    Otherwise, I haven't noticed much between a 5400 to a 7200.

    SATA slightly better then IDE
    SCSI still better then SATA but may be cost prohibitive for a home user.
    Plantwiz
    _____
    "Grammar and spelling aren't everything, but this is a forum, not a chat room. You have plenty of time to spell out the word "you", and look just a little bit smarter." by Phaideaux

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    'i' before 'e' except after 'c'.... weird?
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    JDMurrayJDMurray Admin Posts: 13,031 Admin
    The larger hard drive cache size is important when there is a severe mismatch between the speed of the drive and the available bandwidth on the disk I/O interface (EIDE, SCSI, or SATA) on the motherboard. If the drive is reading data faster than the interface can take it, the data is temporarily stored in the cache so as not to cause the drive to start and stop reading while waiting to the interface to catch up. Cache can also buffer data that is waiting to be written to disk so the computer will not need to wait for the hard drive to finish writing (writing is a much slower operation than reading) . Some caching algorithms can store data that is near data that has been read in case it is also needed (read-ahead and read-behind).

    Drives moved from 2MB to 8MB cache because the industry started producing more 8MB chips than 2MB chips and the prices fell. With this trend continuing, I won't be surprised to see 16MB and 32MB caches on low-end drives in the future.
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