Drives with 8mb Buffer vs. 2mb

[agathodaimon]

Ok, i've been shopping around for a new CDRW drive lately and have noticed some drives with an 8mb buffer and some with a 2mb buffer.

Is there going to be a significant performance increase with an 8mb one versus a 2mb?

I've also seen HARD DRIVES that have a 2mb or an 8mb CACHE... Been wondering about those too.

[SiliconJon]

Well, many will say (and most benchmarks agree) that [CD] drives are nowhere near fast enough to make use of 8MB of cache. DVD-R/RW drives have quite a bit more throughput than the standard optical drives, so they may actually be able to make use of a large cache like 8MB.

Hard drives, however, have done well with the extra cache. But I don't think the performance difference is very noticable. It is noticable, though. Considering the 8MB cache drives are often just a few bucks more, they're a better buy. But sometimes you can find a 2MB cache HD for quite a few bucks cheaper than it's 8MB counterpart, in which I would say go for the much cheaper drive.

Did that help? If not, check the benchmarks & reviews on the particular drives you are considering.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&l...benchmarks+2MB

[John Prophet]

The only catch is that hard drives are sort of THE bottleneck in most cases..so ANY increase in throughput is much needed. But as always it depends on what you do with the comp...moving large blocks of video graphics or stuff like that may benefit more from the 8mb...but I havent looked at the benchmarks in a while...for any sort of performance PC, just go with 8mb and ease your mind.

JP

[agathodaimon]

I just do a lot of gaming on my rig right now and was just thinking of ways to sort of speed things up a bit with access & loading times, etc....
Got a 40-Gig 2mb right now, but am eyeballing a 60-Gig with 8mb Cache... (Maxtor)

I can't afford anything like serial ATA drives right now, so I just want to get the next best thing.

[John Prophet]

Yep, the price is right nowadays too.

JP

[lost-and-found]

agathodaimon: btw, in benchmarks done by tom's hardware guide the SATA performance isn't at all greater than that of ATA133

[gerald_weigel]

I have a Maxtor 120GB with 8MB cache, and I can tell it's running better than the Seagattte 40GB 2MB cache I had.