Hard drive cache

[Guest]

I have an ata100 hard drive with 2mb cache and I am about to fit an
additional ata 133 hard drive with 8mb cache. Is there any advantage to
making my new disk the primary?

 

[Timothy Daniels]

I have an ata100 hard drive with 2mb cache and I am about
to fit an additional ata 133 hard drive with 8mb cache. Is there
any advantage to making my new disk the primary?

If you want to stir up controversy, ask your question in
comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage. You'll get lots of
opinions. My guess is that the theoretical improvement
would be un-noticeable. Whether you make the new HD
the data disk or the system disk would also depend on
what kind of applications you run. PhotoShop might favor
putting the data on the new faster HD.

*TimDaniels*

 

[kony]

I have an ata100 hard drive with 2mb cache and I am about to fit an
additional ata 133 hard drive with 8mb cache. Is there any advantage to
making my new disk the primary?

The larger cache helps a little. By itself, it might not be
enough reason to change the drive configuration, BUT this
new drive probably has higher data density and capacity too
so it's STR (sustained transfer rate) as well as latency
could be (usually is with *all else* remaining equal)
better.

However, the most gain will typically be from not merely
making the new drive the primary but partitioning off a
small first partition for the OS, perhaps 6-20GB in size,
depending on your needs.

 

[Sleepy]

I have an ata100 hard drive with 2mb cache and I am about to fit an
additional ata 133 hard drive with 8mb cache. Is there any advantage to
making my new disk the primary?

The new drive will be faster and if its a 7200rpm spin speed jobby
and the old one I suspect is 5400rpm then that'll help a lot more.
8mb drives typically have 3 year guararntees whereas 2mb
drives only have 1 year. So I would put the new drive in as
slave and use the manufacturers utility to partition and copy everything
over
then swap the drives and use the old drive as a slave drive basically for
data
storage. It'll prolong its life. Also you could put a fixed swapfile on the
slave drive
and that'll help system performance.

 

[GT]

I have an ata100 hard drive with 2mb cache and I am about to fit an
additional ata 133 hard drive with 8mb cache. Is there any advantage to
making my new disk the primary?

The higher cache indicates that it is a newer (and larger) drive, so is
probably faster. Why not insert it as a slave at first, perform some speed
tests and if it is quicker, then re-configure the PC with the newer drive as
the master. Windows will boot, applications etc will load faster.
Alternatively, configure it as the slave and move your swap file (virtual
memory) to the slave drive. Where possible, it helps performance if you can
put the swap file on a different drive from the system.