Harddrive Buffer size??

  • Thread starter Thread starter Fishybob
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Fishybob

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Hi, my old harddrive died dramatically last month and I'm getting it replaced.

I'm going to go for a Seagate (for acoustic reasons) and it's going to be 7200.

The question is... how much better is the 8m buffer for Operating System Drive?

I know it's vital for the audio drive to kick out a great speed but the one I want is purely for XP and apps.


Any ideas??? :confused:
 
Actually, the large buffer size will make more difference for your operating-system-and-applications drive than for a dedicated audio-file drive.

The purpose of buffering is to avoid hitting the disk. For reading, that means keeping a copy of recently-read data in the buffer, because it's generally probable that you'll need it again soon. If it's in the buffer, the disk itself does not need to be accessed.

For writing, it means being able to wait longer until committing the data to disk.

Audio files are very large, and we generally read and write them in large sequential operations. Buffering, therefore, doesn't help us a lot, unless we're reading very short files repeatedly. On the system drive, however, we're reading smaller files all the time, and buffering can be advantageous.
 
Thanks for that reply.

I've looked at prices at Aria.co.uk and the 120G Seagate drives with 8m cache are only about £55!!!

This is give me one seagate and one Maxtor drive. Seagate quiet maxtor noisy(er).

For the least noise which would you choose for audio and which for os and apps???
 
Fishy, given two drives of the same capacity and speed, I would use the quieter one as the system drive. Most of the objectionable noise from a drive (the ticking/clicking noise) comes from its head-positioning solenoid, which is most active when accessing lots of small files, as when the operating system is booting up. Since audio files are so large, there is not a lot of random-access seeking going on when reading or writing them.

I don't know what the current exchange rate is, but that sounds like a fair price. I generally just buy whatever's cheapest, but I'm not concerned with noise as I record fairly far from my computer.
 
You're very lucky! :p

I was hoping to get extension cables and stick the tower elsewhere... but there's nowhere for it to go!! :eek:


Thank you for the use of your brain on these issues. It's all becoming clear! :cool:
 
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