2MB or 8MB question!

[timberwolf1]

I want to buy a hard disk for my new sytem. I can get them with 8MB or 2MB cache. the price difference is about 30$ in the area I life. I saw benchmarks, where a 8MB (80GB) drive from Western Digital whas about 50% faster than a 2MB drive from the same brand (It was an older 20GB model).
I will use my system mostly for gaming. Can someone tell me if the cache makes a big difference in gaming performance? I dont care a lot about loading times. I will use 512MB RAM, so I dont think that the swapfile wil be used alot.



Gary Hendricks
Learn to edit digital video at ... <A HREF="http://www.desktop-video-guide.com" target="_new">Desktop-Video-Guide.com</A>

 

[Toejam31]

For a piddly $30.00 dollars, I'd tend to think that the question is a moot point. Get the drive with the larger cache. It <i>will</i> increase your system performance to a certain degree, and if you are playing a lot of games, every little bit helps. The cache improves performance by reading ahead and having data ready for the rest of the computer. Having the cache on the drive's circuit board adds another layer of efficiency to the buffers and other caches in the rest of the system.

Personally, I really like these WD drives, and I think you will, too. The price is right, and the performance is excellent.

Note: Be sure to get a nice, new ATA-100/133 cable to go along with the new drive, to avoid having installation problems or data corruption.

Toey

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[Scotty35]

Yeah, the 2MB Cache drive has a 1 year warranty where as the 8MB cache has a 3 year warranty.

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[Ashish34]

yea, chances are your actual in-game FPS aren't necessarily going to increase with a faster drive, unless of course you don't have as much RAM and your computer utilizes your swap file\virtual memory a lot during games. But, it'll be definitely worth it with the 8 MB cache... IMHO, there's no point in saving $30 and going with the 2 meg one

~ApT~

Running:
333 MHz Celeron (Slot1)
192 MB RAM
4 MB ATi Rage LT Integrated Video
ESS 1869 Integrated Audio
Comcrap (Compaq) mobo

 

[namek0]

yeah, that's exactly how I feel

If it was a $100 difference I could see why, but for 30 bucks I'd say go for it. I can personally say I have seen a performance increase in going from 2mb to 8mb

It's all good ^_^

 

[blah]

""cache makes a big difference in gaming performance?""

There is no $30 difference once game is loaded.


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