Could anyone please give me some advice on which hard drive I should buy? My motherboard does not support SATA, so it will have to be an ATA-133 drive. My main question is: how important is cache buffer size? I was considering getting the Maxtor Diamondmax Plus 10 250GB ATA-133 with 16MB cache buffer. However, I do not necessarily need that much storage space, but does the 16MB cache buffer make it worthwhile? Would this hard drive be significantly better than say, a Maxtor Diamondmax Plus 10 160GB ATA-133 with 8MB cache buffer? Any help or recommendations would be appreciated. Thanks.
I wouldn't go for the Maxtor range if I had a choice. I think you'll have better performance/reliability overall with Western Digital or Seagate. My Seagate Barracude 120GB 8mb/c works very well and I'm sure similar drives from WD will be just as good and also have a healthy cache size. I don't think that having large caches like 16mb will do much over an 8mb one.
For daily tasks, like web browsing, e-mailing, IM'ing...the cache won't really do much for you. When it comes to gaming, video editing, or something disk intensive, then the 16MB will add extra value. The other issue that you need to take into account is the motherboards ability to handle the large hard drive. There's an addressing issue at the 137GB size, and older motherboards don't have the native support for these large drives. Some can be gotten around with a BIOS update, but others will need to have a controller card installed to hook the hard drive to if you want the full capacity.
