Buffer size in hard drives( Happily resolved)

[Dax_inside]

Hi all

Im going to buy an external hard drive today, ive narrowed it down to two 2.5" drives as they r portable but still have enough capacity for my needs.

The main difference in the two is the buffer size, 1 being 2mb the other 8mb. The 8mb one costs about £20 more, is it worth it? Ive no idea what the buffer size affects im afraid.

Any adivce would be cool.

these r the two im thinking about :
http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx?Qu ... 4294960320

http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx?Qu ... 4294960320

thanks guys and gals.

[MadRat]

i was unable to tell the difference.


have you tryed www.aria.co.uk

sometimes i find them cheaper.

[ph1l0r]

Cache makes not a difference worth 20GBP.

[Dax_inside]

thanks for the fast replies guys. Ill check out that web site too.

[Winter_Lion]

Dax,

The buffers act like the LI memory banks of a processor. They allow info that is accessed constantly to be close at hand in those very same buffers. As pc's evolve as we all know, our software grows even more and beats hell out of resources.

To make a intelligent choice of which one you need: Consider how much of any often used data you can fit into 2mbs and how much into 8mbs of space and follow the logic. If of course you can spend the extra that is.
As hard drives are redesigned and the assembly plants are retooled and parts contractors catch up as well, the 2meg version will go the way of the dinosaur.

What interface are you using? USB or Firewire? Be aware that USB 1 is grammy and grampa grade slow and was superseded by USB 2.0 for good reason. About 40x the transmission speed is the reason.

If you use USB, I would get the bigger cache just to speed it up a bit. Firewire is so fast you prob. wont notice a speed difference in most cases.

If you are using the old parallel port with reversed wiring in the harness, we would be forced to ban you for life and take your nickname away from your sorry butt. Course, we know you are much smarter than that.......lol..

Winter

[ph1l0r]

He is talking about an external 2.5 harddrive. Never seen a Raid setup with USB drives. Due to the rather high latency of the usb2 connection compared to serial ata/ide it simply doesn't make a significant difference worth 20GBP. 2.5 inch drives are slower than 3.5 already and the cache can't make up for speed thats not there. Usually the cache gets disabled anyway with external harddisks to allow for more secure hot plug operation.

[Winter_Lion]

He is talking about an external 2.5 harddrive. Never seen a Raid setup with USB drives.

No, I never have either........God, that would be some three stooges engineering for ya.............Haha

[Dax_inside]

i went for the slightly cheaper 2mb version. Im going to mostly be using it to keep a spare of my hard drive locked away and safe. But i intend to get a laptop in early 2007 and wanted to have an external small enough to easily fit in a laptop bag with it. If i go over seas again with the army its handy to have a hard drive which can be moved around easily too.

Once again, thankyou for the advice.