How much does cache matter?

HUGE! 16mb would make your hardrive perform over 5000% better in reading and writing over 8mb-itch  

roughly 0, if you can find a 16MB cache drive for the same price as an 8MB then go for it, but if you have to pay more don't bother.

There was an article on THG awhile ago

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/03/05/understanding-hard-drive-performance/page6.html#benchmark_results_8_mb_vs_16_mb_buffer

The benchmarks show virtually no difference, so go with whatever's cheaper

It will improve write performance on a system handling thousands of transactions per minute, or handling very large (20+GB) database writes. Read performance won't increase at all.

No valid domestic purpose to 16MB disk cache.

Oh wow, this is excellent!

Just one last question.
The WD Raptor 150GB is significantly faster than the 74GB version.
The difference between them is the 8MB of cache.
So does this mean that 16MB of cache really DO matter for raptors and that would explain why they are starting to make 74GB raptors with 16MB now?

thnx again!

It more or less has to do with the number of platters and the areal density of them. That and it is of the later generation (microcode improvements anyone?) so there are sure to be small tweaks.

If you are deciding between the 74Gb and the 150Gb - if you have the money to spend I'd go with the 150Gb. Alternatively, You could get the 74Gb and use it as your main (OS/Swap/some games) and then with the money saved buy a 320Gb drive and put your office/productivity apps and saved information on them.

Actually im trying to decide between RAID 0 with 4 drives and a 150GB raptor coupled with RAID 0 with 2 drives.

I'd do the 150 gig raptor with raid 1. Really if you are purchasing the raptor it's a little overkill to have a raid 0 array unless this is your test DB machine.

Think of a plan, what is the computer going to be used for? Gaming, multimedia, productivity, development, testing?

Personally I run raid 0 with a backup drive. If anything happens I just replace the hdd and image. If you are going to do multimedia or developing I'd go with raid 5, but again it's just me.

If you really want to spend some money get some 15k 72Gb SAS drives :twisted: