8M or 16M cache on sata HDD

  • Thread starter Thread starter westnet
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westnet

can someone tell me what difference the cache size makes, for example what
performance benifits are there and how much of a performance difference - im
looking at setting up a striped raid array with 2 x 400GB SATA2 Drives

any comments would be great
 
westnet said:
can someone tell me what difference the cache size makes, for example what
performance benifits are there and how much of a performance difference - im
looking at setting up a striped raid array with 2 x 400GB SATA2 Drives

any comments would be great
Click to expand...

In real world use there's no difference.

Why do you think you need a RAID0 array ?
 
Grug said:
In real world use there's no difference.

Why do you think you need a RAID0 array ?
Click to expand...

for speed - i have had a raid0 array on my system for a while and i find it
a lot faster than just 1 single drive for the work i do.
 
westnet said:
for speed - i have had a raid0 array on my system for a while and i find it
a lot faster than just 1 single drive for the work i do.
Click to expand...


I'd asked because many folks jump on the idea of using RAID without
realizing the potential disadvantages as well.
 
Grug said:
I'd asked because many folks jump on the idea of using RAID without
realizing the potential disadvantages as well.
Click to expand...

yep i understand where you are coming from - thats why i backup my
important partitions on a regular basis (to another non raid hard drive)
 
can someone tell me what difference the cache size makes, for example what
performance benifits are there and how much of a performance difference - im
looking at setting up a striped raid array with 2 x 400GB SATA2 Drives

any comments would be great
Click to expand...


Cache size makes no practical difference, the other inherant
differences between the two drives (one having 8, other 16MB
of cache) will tend to matter more. If your controller &
drives use NCQ and your access benefits from that, has a lot
(server scenario more likely than desktop or workstation) of
concurrent I/O then the cache size would matter more but
still not much relative to the particular drives'
performance otherwise and given a RAID0 the I/O is already
split between them making it, in theory, even less of a
factor.

You didn't mention the use of the array.
 
A larger cache will improve performance mostly when there are concurring write operations.
 
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