8Mb Cache Hard Drive

Not very often I wax lyrical on hardware (too many years in the IT trade has left me sceptical of the next great idea)

However

I recently put a new HDD with 8Mb cache in my PC. WHAT A DIFFERENCE !

XP now boots in 25 seconds

I'm not even going to put the rest of the PCs spec (its nothing special at all which is why I never bbother with it in my sig)

If you are considering one upgrade to boost your performance then I suggest that this is it

Discuss (as they say in British educational institutions)

 

DITTO!!

 

I was using a somewhat older Maxtor "8" which only had a two MB cache so I figured I'd get a performance boost from the Maxtor "9" which had a 8MB cache. Well upon installation, I noticed a slowdown in boot time and game map load times. WTH? BTW, both drives are 7200RPM.

I benchmarked both drives with HDTach 2.61 and found that my older 2MB cache drive had an average read speed of 53MB/sec while the newer 8MB cache drive had an average read speed of about 42MB/sec.

I assumed that the new drive was flawed and e-mail to Maxtor was replied to with nothing but marketing double-talk. Posts to another tech forum yielded nothing but "access time is more important than raw read speed" which sounds nice but obviously didn't reflect reality in my situation.

I then looked up my older 2MB cache drive in all the benchmarks at storagereview.com. It turns out that this older drive beats most every IDE drive and even some SATA drives in raw read speed. I also found out that the benchmarks I got for the newer drive were normal for that drive.

What's nice is that since this drive is older, it can be had for a song. I think the moral of my story is that hard drive performance for each person depends on a number of factors. For me, raw read speed works quite well for what I do. I ended returning the Maxtor 9.

Gary

 

Bought a 120Gb Maxtor last year - paid the extra for 8Mb rather than 2Mb - it just ZIPS along!

 

Hey Chiles. Some interesting reading. When I do the PCPitstop routine, I get some extremely varied numbers on each drive.

You said:

What is it and can you tell me how to get it.

Will appreciate it.

Martin

 

You can get it here . The free version gives you average read speed, average access time, "burst" speed and cpu utilization. The paid version adds write speeds as well.

I've used it for years - it's a very nice tool. You used to have to turn "autoplay" off on your CD-type drives before running or it would crash. But that was in the Win98 days and not sure if it would have that problem with XP.

I highly recommend it.

Gary

 

Thanks Gary, I'll give it a whirl, let you know if it crashes XP with Autorun enabled on CD.

Martin

Edit: Ran ok on XP, no crashes, has version 2.7 up.

Thanks again