I am currently using an OEM hard drive that a purchased from newegg a while back. Can I take it out of my current computer and put it in a new one or does it have to be retail?

There should be no issues with the hard drive itself, but the software will have to be reinstalled.

One more question: Does the amount of cache in a hard drive matter? Will a higher cache improve my gaming performance or is it more for memory heavy programs like AutoCAD? If I have a low cache will a large amount of memory make up for it? Thanks.

Larger cache memory can help improve the Hard Drive's performance.

The only affect on gaming would be slightly faster load and save times.


The cache is basically there on the hard drive to "anticipate" what's the next chunk of info programs need. If it is not in the cache, then the program will search for that data on the hard drive.

cache size does deal with performance, but mostly in transfering large files. the hd is also used less since it stores info in cache. wlll it have better gaming performance? newer hard drives which have larger cache sizes like my seagate 7200.11 500gb and 750 gb, do have overall better performance. but it's not simply because of larger size, as i understand it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_buffer
here's an article what cache is and what it does

As far as I know, cache is a buffer... for lack of a better term, it's' hard drive RAM. If you are moving a 8GB file in between 2 partitions, a hard drive with a 32MB cache will perform much better then a disk with a 2MB cache.

It will increase load times and stuff a bit, but as far as actual gaming, I'm sure that there will be absolutely minimal difference (I would be surprised if there was any).