Manning brainwashed me

Thanks Tedwood, good to know about the differences.

Begs the question, where is Manning exactly? Seems we haven't read from him in a long time...

. If you actually carefully work out the numbers for any given drive, you will see that beyond a certian level (like about 8MB), additional cache does not buy any increase in performance. This is primarily due to the interface transfer rate limitation (eSATA, SAS, etc.) versus the internal drive data transfer rate into the cache (including any average seek time). Bragging about large buffers is just another way that manufacturers can pretend to have superior performance with very little cost (an extra 16Meg of RAM is pretty damn cheap). Actual real-world average transfer rate measurement benchmarks are the only real way to tell peformance and if you look at those tests, the drives with larger caches do not always win, especially with streaming data (such as audio and video). There is nothing WRONG with a bigger cache, it just doesn't buy you much in many cases. Higher RPM and higher capacity per disk, however, will always result in a faster transfer rate. .

Great post! Thanks for the feedback Tedwood and Kihoalu. All you need is all you need. The quest for faster these days seems a bit moot, at least for my needs it is. Still haven't come close to maxing out my ageing 3 year old quad and drives.Let it be! ;-)