HDD help ?
- Thread starter jamjar
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Soldato
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It's not just cache you want to be looking at, but also platter size and rotational speed.
As I'm sure you have heard before, the Samsung F3 is the top performing mainstream hard disk at the moment. The 1TB has 32MB of cache, 2 platters and costs £61. The 500GB has 16MB cache, 1 platter and costs £39.
As you can see, per/GB the 1TB is cheaper and the extra cache should make it a bit faster (as should the second platter I believe). However, the 500GB is still a good performer.
If you think you can make use of at least 500GB, then you may as well pay the extra £22 for the 1TB. If not, save your money and get the plenty quick 500GB version.
As I'm sure you have heard before, the Samsung F3 is the top performing mainstream hard disk at the moment. The 1TB has 32MB of cache, 2 platters and costs £61. The 500GB has 16MB cache, 1 platter and costs £39.
As you can see, per/GB the 1TB is cheaper and the extra cache should make it a bit faster (as should the second platter I believe). However, the 500GB is still a good performer.
If you think you can make use of at least 500GB, then you may as well pay the extra £22 for the 1TB. If not, save your money and get the plenty quick 500GB version.
Soldato
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Both F3's perform the same, the cache doesn't make a difference.
This
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What's the point in doubling the cache size then
My hard drive has 16 MB cache and I would have thought that 32 MB of cache would be better
Well, in this case we are talking about comparing a 1TB disk with 32MB cache with a 500GB disk with 16MB cache - the additional cache is more likely to be there to cater for the large disk size, than to increase performance.
Comparing like with like however, a 32MB cache may give a slight improvement but spindle speed and data density will have far more effect on peformance than inbuilt cache - and whilst the inbuilt cache may improve benchmark figures in normal use the operating system will be managing some system memory as a disk cache which would obscure any performance differences due to inbuilt cache.
You may also find inbuilt cache sizes increase just due to the fact the smaller capacity memory chips will become more expensive to buy as mass production moves to the larger sizes!
Matthew
Comparing like with like however, a 32MB cache may give a slight improvement but spindle speed and data density will have far more effect on peformance than inbuilt cache - and whilst the inbuilt cache may improve benchmark figures in normal use the operating system will be managing some system memory as a disk cache which would obscure any performance differences due to inbuilt cache.
You may also find inbuilt cache sizes increase just due to the fact the smaller capacity memory chips will become more expensive to buy as mass production moves to the larger sizes!
Matthew
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Fair enough, makes sense that
