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Hard drive cache question

Post Date: 2010-06-05
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GosuHyunwoo View Drop Down
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Posts: 200 		  Quote GosuHyunwoo Quote  Post ReplyReply bullet Topic: Hard drive cache question
    Posted: 05 Jun 2010 at 12:20am
Does anyone know how much of a difference 16mb of cache differs from 32mb of cache? I WAS going to just go for 500gigs of 16mb cache from here, but my friend was telling me that this was going to bottleneck a bad arse i7 computer

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Dragoonseal View Drop Down
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Posts: 2247 		  Quote Dragoonseal Quote  Post ReplyReply bullet Posted: 05 Jun 2010 at 2:03am
A 1TB 32MB cache HDD will indeed be faster than a 500GB 16MB cache HDD. Partially because of the cache and partially because of the increased platter size. HDDs can access data on the outter edges of a platter the fastest, so the more data they can fit on the outter edges the less they have to move to the slower inner side of the platter.

But, heh, there isn't a HDD in existence that won't bottleneck the living hell out of your DS i7 PC. You have to get a SSD if you want to help alleviate that issue. Get an 80GB Intel SSD for OS/apps and a few games, and a 500GB or 1TB HDD for everything else, games/movies/music/photos, and then you're golden.
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GosuHyunwoo View Drop Down
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Posts: 200 		  Quote GosuHyunwoo Quote  Post ReplyReply bullet Posted: 05 Jun 2010 at 3:03am
Thanks for the advice! (man i love this forum!) but one more question...will a faster hard drive have a noticeable effect on gaming? Just for load times right?


Edited by GosuHyunwoo - 05 Jun 2010 at 3:06am

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Dragoonseal View Drop Down
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Posts: 2247 		  Quote Dragoonseal Quote  Post ReplyReply bullet Posted: 05 Jun 2010 at 3:23am
Originally posted by GosuHyunwoo

Thanks for the advice! (man i love this forum!) but one more question...will a faster hard drive have a noticeable effect on gaming? Just for load times right?

Some games have a bad habit of trying to load stuff from the HDD on the fly too often during play, so you can get stuttering or a delay in textures showing up, a SSD can help with this. However for the most part no, games generally do not benefit much from faster HDDs or even SSDs, they just get faster start up, loading, and alt-tab recover times. Moreover, while some games will have noticeably much faster load times on an SSD I've found that there are some (like the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series) that gain little benefit in load times.

So if you want a SSD on a budget feel free to get a smaller 40GB or 80GB Intel SSD for OS/apps and just install games on the normal HDD, you won't be missing much.
Lilim
Intel Core i7 920 @4.2GHz
HAF 932 - Dual SLI Nvidia GTX 480s
3x Intel X25-M G2 (80GB) SSD RAID0
R.I.P. Sinbad the cat (November 16, 1996 - April 18, 2011)
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