Hard Drive Cache

[Mr5oh]

So hard drives for quite some time have had 8 MB of cache, and I have noticed some new Maxtor drives are starting to have 16 MB cache. Why don't we have more than this? Wouldn't having a hard drive with say 128-256 MB of cache, speed things up considerably? So it could copy large amounts of information to the cache, and finishing writing it to disk in the background?

Maybe I don't fully understand how a hard drive works, or something?

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[sjonnie]

1) The more cache you have the more you run the risk of loosing data. 2) More cache is expensive and doesn't necessarily lead to performance improvement. 3) The system cache is already >128-256MB.

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[Mr5oh]

But doesn't the hard drive consistantly use the 8 MB of cache that it has now? Would this risk not be the same?

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[sjonnie]

The disk does indeed use the cache now, for reads or writes. Never seen the 'Delayed Write Failed' error?

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[Mr5oh]

Never seen the 'Delayed Write Failed' error?

Apprantly I am lucky, as I never have (knock on wood). Probably happen all the time now that I have said that I never saw this message.

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