hard drive speed

Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
sooooo....i'm looking to buy a giant hard drive for my b&w...wait, i'm going to interrupt my post. i took the plunge and got a computer capable of os x! as some of you may remember, i was running 8.6 on my powermac 6500 for some time...i found a b&w 350mhz for $200, overclocked it to 400mhz and put os x on it. os x is quite cool, not as sluggish as i was expecting, though certainly not as responsive as 9. Do i like it better than 9? That's tough, it's different, not better or worse IMO...i should stay where the new mac software is though, right? Anyhow, now that i've moved from 1995 to 1999, i'm wanting to put a whopping hard drive in my B&W. It is a rev. 1, so i'll have to do an external firewire drive because of the lame IDE controller on board of the B&W rev1 logic board. I'm thinking of getting a bare IDE drive and a FW encolsure, should be cheaper.



now, BACK to my question We've got hard drives with 8mb caches and 2mb caches plus a few diff. brand to choose from. I see some benchmarks showing differences, but will there be any noticeable differences on my b&w between the drives? I'd like to get a 120gb drive, and can't decide between the 2mb and 8mb caches. What does that mean, anyway? Plus, will it slow anything down to use firewire rather than keeping it internal. As fast as FW is, i doubt it. Any info is appreciated!

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 3
    1337_5l4xx0r1337_5l4xx0r Posts: 1,558member
    No one has ever coherently explained the benefit of large caches on an HD. In OSX, everything read off the HD is cached in ram anyway, and with DMA and all that, I'm not convinced a large cache provides tangible benefits over small caches. I could be wrong. Computers use system ram as a cache is what I'm saying.



    Big drives give sweet throughput. However, you can't just pop in the largest drive you can find. You have to find out what the largest drive your ATA controller will support is. There's a limit to how big a drive ATA 66 or whatever can handle. If you exceed that limit, your computer will not 'see' the extra space (If the drive works at all).
  • Reply 2 of 3
    progmacprogmac Posts: 1,850member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by 1337_5L4Xx0R



    Big drives give sweet throughput. However, you can't just pop in the largest drive you can find. You have to find out what the largest drive your ATA controller will support is. There's a limit to how big a drive ATA 66 or whatever can handle. If you exceed that limit, your computer will not 'see' the extra space (If the drive works at all).




    is this still relevent since i will be using firewire? regardless, i'll check out some compatibility ratings on XLR8
  • Reply 3 of 3
    ebbyebby Posts: 3,110member
    No problem. The controller chip on your firewire interface probably supports large drives. (>137GB) Unless it is very old but even some of them have flash updates. I use a 200GB firewire drive with my Beige G3 and it works fine. As for the cache... I don't know exactly what it does but it is safe to assume more is better. The biggest performace difference between hard drives is their RPM speed. Laptops (about 4000 RPM) are noticably slower at disk-access than my 5000 RPM drives, which I replaced with 7000 RPM drives which are faster. There are also 10,000 and 15,000 RPM drives but they are mostly SCSI and built for servers. Very expensive.
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