Slightly OT: ATA 133 or 8Mb buffer for my HD?

[Bobby]

I'm about to buy a new 80Gb HD and I'm not sure whether to purchase an ATA
133 drive with 2Mb cache or an ATA 100 drive with 8Mb buffer. Can anyone
advise? Which one would make Windows XP Pro run faster? Cheers.

Bobby

 

[Willit]

Real life who knows. The ATA 133 must have a controller to
match or it will drop back to what ever is on your system
board or card.

 

[VManes]

Go with the bigger buffer. Even if your motherboard supports ATA133, the
difference is not as big as that likely to result from the larger buffer on
the drive. In either case, it really depends on what type of applications
your run - frequent reads of small bits of data or reading of large files
(video?)

Val

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Real life who knows. The ATA 133 must have a controller to
match or it will drop back to what ever is on your system
board or card.

 

[Bobby]

My mobo is ATA 133 and my current HD is ATA 133 - although I was
disappointed in performance when I first installed it (no apparent
difference in speed).

I run the usual mix of apps - mostly Office but some video and some games
and pdf. I do run several apps simultaneously and usually have several
windows open (no problem with 512Mb RAM).