SATA II hard drive advice needed - cache size

commited · 14 Oct 2009 at 10:42

I'm in the process of upgrading the RAM and HDD in my parents PC. It isn't anything fancy, and it doesn't need to do anything fancy, it's just full of crap and slow, so I'm doing a full reformat and getting rid of the old, slow 40gb hdd.

Seeing as hard drives are so cheap, I've recommended they get a largish hard drive - the 500gb drives seem like good value.

Now the question - will 32mb cache make a noticeable difference over 16mb for everyday use?

rpstewart · 14 Oct 2009 at 10:47

In short, no.

There's a law of diminishing returns when it comes to cache sizes, there will be an improvement in the cache hit rate but it'll be so small as to not be noticeable.

commited · 14 Oct 2009 at 10:54

Thanks for the reply. The 500gb Samsung on special offer @ ocuk will be fine for the task then?

rpstewart · 14 Oct 2009 at 11:02

Other than it being out of stock the only thing to worry about is whether your board supports SATA300, the Samsungs are a bit of a pain to kick down to SATA150 mode.

commited · 14 Oct 2009 at 11:13

ahh I didn't realise. To be honest, I've been out of the loop on PC hardware for a few years now. What would be a safe bet, assuming it's SATA150 (which I imagine it is)?