Page 1 of HDD Cache

Hi i am looking to buy two new hard disks and my final selection has come down to this. Either 120GB Vancouver HDD and an 80GB Vancouver HDD both ATA 100 7200RPM and 2MB Cache OR two Western Digital 80GB HDD ATA100 7200 RPM only with 8MB cache. Basically the latter has a significantly higher cache and i was wondering does this make great deal of differance in access speeds etc. My PC will eventually running Windows Xp and is an Athlon 1600XP+ 512MB DDR RAM if that has any influance on your answer.

Paul

I would guess it will depend on what primarily you will use the system for. As the choice seems to be for a capacity of between 120 and 200 gig then that would leave a fair amount of scope.Personally I would go for the 120 gig and use the money you were considering spending on another drive to buy more memory You can get a 120 gig for about £150 and 512 meg PC2100 for £110. The HDD might not increase performance significantly but the memory would certainly help. If speed is really what you want you could also get a Volcano 6C+ fan and clock the 1600XP to 1800. I`ve had my 1500XP running at 1700XP for a while now with no problems.If you are concerned that this will fry the CPU set the temp. trip (In Bios set-up) to 55 C and see how it goes.HTH

....I`ve just bought a Volcano 9+ fan for a pc I`m building - what a beast! It has a temperature sensor that goes under the CPU, so alters the fan speed depending on CPU temp., but also has a manual rheostat connector, so you can manually set the fan speed. Not installed it yet, so no comment on performance yet...

Re the hard discs - Choagy is right - it depends what you want it for. Have a look at http://www.storagereview.com - they test hard discs and give good benchmark info. I assume you want two hard discs so you can split operating system and data for security? Or is it simply capacity? If you are desperate for speed, consider getting a RAID controller and striping - you get the capacity of both discs, and faster access. OR do what I do, and set the RAID to mirror - you only get the capacity of one of the discs, but if one dies, your data is still safe. I`m lucky - the motherboard I got has RAID on board.

This item was edited on Tuesday, 30th July 2002, 08:14

Thanks for the info. I did in the end decide to go for two 80GB IBM disks both with 2MB cache. i couldnt really see the extra benefit in the extra cache. The reason i wanted two was so one can be used for operating system software etc and the other is purely fo MP3s alone. I do intend on getting one or two more 80GB disks so that i can make use of the RAID function that i also have on my otherboard to mirror the other disks to serve as a form of backup as at the moment im playing it dangerously with no backup at all.

Thanks again

why not just partition one hard drive if thats all you want the seperate hard drives for?