Is an extra 8 MB HDD cache worth $15?

[OhioGuy]

I found the following deal:

http://www.memorylabs.net/40sesa.html

On this page, you should see the Seagate 400 GB SATA2 drive in upper left
hand corner
Click on that, then check "no" to all the accessories. Choose free ground
shipping.


Total came to $78 for me, no tax. Free Airborne@Home standard ground
shipping. No rebates or coupons to mess with, either.

This thing is OEM, so no cables or extras, just the bare drive. If you
are like me, you probably have loads of extra cables anyway, so this is no
biggie. The great thing on this drive is that it is SATA2 and it has the
full 5 year warranty. With heavy use, drives from any manufacturer may
start to fail after 3-4 years, so it may really be worth it to you. The one
time I had a Seagate drive fail on me, I got a good replacement drive that
lasted me another 6 years. They also sent me a replacement drive that had a
LARGER capacity than the one I sent in - you can't beat that!

Or, you could do what I do - keep them for 2 years, then sell them online
with a 3 year warranty included! (along with original receipt) People like
used drives that still have 3 years left on the warranty - you'd be amazed
at how much more people will bid on a used drive like this on Ebay, with an
official warranty as part of the package.

Specs:

Seagate Barracuda 400GB 7200 RPM SATA II 7200.9
Manufacturer part #ST3400833AS
Capacity: 400 GB (3 133+ GB platters)
Rotational Speed: 7200 RPM
Interface: SATA 300
Max External transfer rate: 300 MB/s

Note: For another $15, they have the ST3400633AS, which is the same drive,
but with a
16 MB drive buffer, instead of 8 MB. You'd have to decide whether it is
worth an extra $15 to double the drive cache.

What do you think - is it worth $15 to double the drive's cache size?

 

[John Doe]

Note: For another $15, they have the ST3400633AS, which is the same
drive, but with a
16 MB drive buffer, instead of 8 MB. You'd have to decide whether
it is worth an extra $15 to double the drive cache.

What do you think - is it worth $15 to double the drive's cache
size?

Probably not. I would ask in the storage group, they specialize in hard
drives.

 

[Marty Fremen]

Note: For another $15, they have the ST3400633AS, which is the same
drive, but with a
16 MB drive buffer, instead of 8 MB. You'd have to decide whether it
is worth an extra $15 to double the drive cache.

What do you think - is it worth $15 to double the drive's cache
size?

No.

You're paying about 20% more for a drive which will have maybe 1% better
performance at most. (If you google around you should be able to find
benchmark tests confirming this.)

Offering extra cache is like those electronics retailers who try to get
you to pay an extra $20 for a cable that's worth $1 - they do it because
the profit on the cable is more than the profit on the equipment they're
selling you.

If a drive is available with two sizes of cache, you can be sure that
the smaller one is adequate - given the low price of RAM, no
manufacturer would be crazy enough to make a drive that had a cache so
small that it signficantly impaired performance.

A drive only really needs enough cache to store the data read during one
rotation of the disk, so that it can start reading immediately instead
of waiting for the start of a file to come round. Any more disk head
cache than this has minimal benefit, for your $15 you'd be much better
off buying more main RAM so as to have a bigger disk cache at the CPU
end - data cached in main memory is available instantly, whereas data
cached at the drive still has to be fetched over the bus. For $15 you
could buy another 256 MB of RAM which would be give a massively more
useful disk cache than another paltry 8MB at the other end of the SATA
cable. (Having said that, the benefit of 256MB more disk cache in main
memory would probably still be quite small.)

 

[John Doe]

(Off-topic)

Offering extra cache is like those electronics retailers who try to
get you to pay an extra $20 for a cable that's worth $1 - they do it
because the profit on the cable is more than the profit on the
equipment they're selling you.

Obviously they don't cost the manufacturers much. I (and probably most
others here) get lots of juicy cables/connectors for free, included
with hardware. But, if I'm not mistaken, usually they are not cheap
when purchased separately (bringing back memories of a store called
RadioShack). I keep the most difficult to replace and expensive
looking cables and connectors.