Hard drive cache basic knowledge

[Guest]

Hi!

Is there anyone who could tell something about the hard drive cache basics?

I would be interested to know more about e.g.
a) the hard drives do usually have some from 96kB up to 8MB cache, so, is
this a real cache module on the drive board inside the drive?
b) if a hard drive is said to have 0kB cache, i.e. no cache, does this mean
there is no cache module inside the drive, or is it just somehow disabled and
could also be enabled?
c) in addition to the possible inside drive cache there is also a disk cache
using part of the system memory, in Win98 named vcache, in Win2000 maybe
something else, but what's it in WinXP?
d) is there still some other disk cache somewhere in the hw/sw complexity?
e) the most interesting question might be, how to define/use these cache
possibilities for the best performance results?


Thanks in advance for any replies.


Best regards,

Pete V.

 

[Guest]

WHilst not answering the specific questions in sequence, if you read this
article, you will have a proper understanding:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows98/downloads/contents/WUCritical/q273017/Default.asp