Cache VS bandwidth SATA VS SATA2

[RamaX]

Im building 3 systems, 1 for gaming 2 for media type stuff (phot/video/music) and ive got just about everything figgured out...except:

i was set on the Maxtor someone had suggested, but something kept nagging at me. Its not SATA2, and i was wondering how much performance i was losing because of it. All the mobos i looked at were capable of SATA2 (yes i know they can do SATA reg, but why limit myself?) So i went-a-lookin
This Hitachi has similar stats except its 8mb cache VS 16 for Max-very hard to find a reasonable priced SATA2 that has 16mb cache. Their other stats are similar: Max seek 9/latency 4.17 Hit 8.5/4.17 so its just the cahe and the SATA 1.5gb VS SATA2 3gb bandwidth thats the tradeoffs.
Whatcha think..? whats more important? The Hit is $20 more, theyre both 250 gig, so i could prob absorb that if theres like a reason to.
thanks...yet again hehe

 

[chuckles]

From what I've heard:

If your looking for speed loading games and aon't care about price or capacity, get a Wester Digital Raptor 74GB. it has a seek time of about 4.5 ms (half of conventional drives), but is only SATA 150.

If your looking for capacity and speed, its hard to tell. With the 16MB cache it will load the data to the cache at around 300MB/s but it bottlenecks at the HDD because of the seek time. In the end, small stuff will load quicker (some games) with SATA2 but big stuff (16MB+ for 16MB cache) SATA 150 will be really close. It is a matter of opinion basically.

 

[fishmahn]

What chuckles said is true, but you only get the benefit of > ATA/100 speeds (his loading from cache part) IF the data is in the cache, and then for only 16MB. Such a small amount of data going at 'wire speed' means there is really no effective difference between an SATA150, SATA300 (SATA2), and ATA/100 or ATA/133 as long as the other stats are the same (seek/latency/rpm/etc.). Only when the data is fed from cache is it faster, and 16megabytes of cache for a 250gigabyte drive (or more) tells me that won't be often regardless of the drive's caching algorithm.

Mike.