I need a couple of SATA drives for storage purposes. I'm looking at a pair of Samsung spinpoint 400Gb ones that I will probably put into RAID1. The 8mb cache drive is £67. The 16mb cache drive is £80. Is it worth going for the larger cache? I mean I doubt I'll notice the difference anyway because I'll just be storing stuff on the disks and playing music and vids etc from them. Will there be a noticable performance increase? Any advice greatly appreciated as always
I've owned both and can't really feel a difference. However, especially for storage drives, it's not going to matter at all. Save yourself the money and get the cheaper drives. My understanding is that cache mostly holds writes sent to the drive which are small enough to fit the cache, so you don't have to wait for the drive to write them to the platters before you are ready to move on to some other task. For a storage drive, which will presumably have many files larger than 16 MB and will spend more time reading than writing, there's no benefit that justifies the extra money.
Thanks crazy bob. That's kind of what I thought. Maybe you're not so crazy after all! or we both are. Thanks.
Spookily, this guide i read yesterday covers just that question: http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/03/05/understanding-hard-drive-performance/
