Hard drive question

[Amnesic]

What is the better hard drive of these two. Iam buying it from dell.

160GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s Hard Drive (7200RPM) w/ 8MB cache
320GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s Hard Drive (7200RPM) w/ 16MB cache- I was thinking this one and it is only 90 bucks more.

All the other hard drives are just Raid 0 and Raid 1

Thanks

[Consultant01]

Re: Hard drive question

Im pretty sure Cache helps with seek times, so more is obviously better... I imagine the increase in performance will be nearly inperceptible.

[BigDaddyTX]

Re: Hard drive question

16mb Cache is definitely better. It means more is stored in flash memory on the drive, and written to disk when drive isn't being used as hard. Now, you hammer the drive all the time, it has to write it.

You'll see a modest performance increase.

[mlkmnz]

Re: Hard drive question

Yes but you have to add in the factor that if you fill up that 320Gb drive, there's a bucketload more data to sift through. You'd probably find load times, especially when "verifying client data" would be long as apparently BF2 is checking your whole hard drive for exploits.

Impossible to tell without having tested both drives in the same environment.

[BigDaddyTX]

Re: Hard drive question

True about the testing, but you can always partition the drive. This reduces head travel time by allowing it to "jump" ahead.

I perosnally don't run higher than 160GB, and only that large for video storage. I tend to run smaller drives for Os & Games, with high cache, and even 10K RPM if you can find it.