Any need for me to upgrade?

[Quitoman]

This is the HDD I have right now

Performance
Interface IDE Ultra ATA100
Capacity 160GB
RPM 7200 RPM
Cache 2MB
Average Seek Time 8.5ms
Average Latency 4.16ms

I'm worried about the 2MB cache, but I don't know much about what that is. Could someone explain what it is to me? It's is the stock HDD that came with my old Emachine back in 2004.

so from a IDE 2MB hard drive to say a SATA 3GB/s 16MB or 32MB hard drive, am I going to see a noticeable difference? I use barely any hard drive space so leave that out of it.

 

[Quitoman]

Anyone?

 

[g3force]

This is the HDD I have right now

Performance
Interface IDE Ultra ATA100
Capacity 160GB
RPM 7200 RPM
Cache 2MB
Average Seek Time 8.5ms
Average Latency 4.16ms

I'm worried about the 2MB cache. This is the stock HDD that came with my shitty Emachines back in 2004. I've upgraded literally everything in my PC except my Hard Drive, and my computer still opens things kind of slow sometime so I'm thinking of upgrading the HDD.

so from a IDE 2MB hard drive to say a SATA 3GB/s 16MB or 32MB hard drive, and I going to see a difference. I use barely any hard drive space so leave that out of it.

I skimped on the HDD in my system a year ago and used an old Maxtor 160GB IDE drive. A few months later, I bought a WD 640GB Blue drive and the benefits were huge. Bootup was much faster, application load times were zippy (not to mention the drive was a lot quieter), and to my surprise, I got 3x to 4x speeds on fragmented files. To come to think of it, its amazing put up with the old Maxtor drive, especially when I had to deal with the awful load times in games :lol:

 

[Gin Fushicho]

Your going to notice a load of difference between the two. get a new HDD.

 

[Quitoman]

Awesome!

Now my question is how big of a difference does a 16MB and a 32MB cache make?

Here's the 16MB:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148262

And here's the 32MB:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136284

The Western Digital also says it has Dual Processors, so would that make a difference also? Which one do you think I should go for?

 

[wuzy]

The speed increase you're going to experience from the new drive isn't going to come from the cache alone. It's mainly speed from modern mechanical hardware. 16MB and 32MB isn't going to make a difference for typical usage.

And of course make sure your motherboard supports SATA, seeing you're coming from a PATA.

 

[Quitoman]

K thanks everyone! I just ordered the 16MB cache one on Newegg for $52.