Is there a noticeable difference between the performance two sizes of cache... whats the recommendations of brands that also give silence (or as close to). I was originally planing to buy a new drive when i did a whole pc overhaul but its needed now (big surprise)
You probably wouldn't notice much of a real-world usage difference between 8-16MB cache with all other things being equal (though it would be a bit quicker), its more down to the drive design. (EG, a 8MB current Hitachi drive would be quicker than a 16MB Seagate drive) I've found samsung drives the quietest out of the ones I've used, I can't comment on the noise levels on current Seagate or 7k WD drives (though I wouldn't reccommend Seagate anyway because they tend to be quite sluggish) Also note that there isn't any (again, real-world) performance difference between SATA300 (often incorrectly referred to as SATA2) and SATA150 in current drives.
This is always worth a quick check Storage Review Charts 16M cache is always good to get even though it represents little real world performance increase due to the lower physical reads/writes and its worth looking for native command queing too My 2p's worth!
If you're ever going to quote or link any HDD info, make sure in future you get it from StorageReview. Or at the very least somewhere other than Tom's
Thanks, just made a quick trip over to see what this site had to offer, gutted i hadn't known of this before.
The latest Seagate drives (the 7200.10 drives - you know the one that goes up to 750Gb) are the fastest in the class. Having said that, you probably won't find much difference between all of the drives.
By fastest, I'm guessing you mean with regards to sustained transfer. This is true as they currently have the highest data density. However, there is more to a drive's performance than low level figures like STR. Also, note that the 7200.10 (their current 10k and 15k models as well for that matter) is a generation ahead (in terms of technology/time, not necessarily performance) of the current models from other manufacturers who have now had their flagships around for quite some time and are due for an update in the very near future.
usually, you want to have the biggest cache available because it reduces the time that the drives needs to spin to find the information it's looking for. of course the RPM is the major spec you should consider; a 10k with 16mb of cache will be much faster overall than a 7500 with 32 mb of cache.
