So, I've been looking at extending my PCs storage capacity and found myself stranded - there are two HDDs I'm considering on getting and I can't decide which - both are SATA II, have 7200rpms and are 160GB of data capacity. But the buffer (chache?) is 2MB and 8MB. The price differs by like 1.00 £; Sure, 8MB is better - that's what my intuition's saying to me. but the real difference? ...:x:
this is a very sensitive subject, as, many people believe that cache memory is unimportant, because a HDD cannot transfer data faster than it's interface will let it (ATA, SATA of SCSI) however, the amount of cache memory a HDD has is very important as the HDD uses cache memory as temporary storage, because, it is faster to read/write from memory than it is to read/write to the HDD hope that helps
As far as I'm aware, the cache on the disk will buffer read/writes to it, and a larger disk buffer will mean the CPU will send larger amounts of data fewer times, while it does other things. For the extra £1, I think it's worth it for the 8mb cache.
thankies Addis BTW: i thought HDDs had small internal CPUs inside them to reduce the load on the main CPU ? but, obviously i must be wrong
Every interaction with the hard disk is done through a controller, so the CPU doesn't have to deal with the mechanics anyway, with less cache the CPU will have to stop it's current task to send more data more often.
