Hitachi?

Building a new rig and purchased a WD 500 gb for $80.00, when I looked in the bag (at home) there was a circular which has the Hitachi 1TB for the same price.

Could this be a matter of brand popularity (Micro center has a "ton" of WD) over not so well known Hitachi (computer component wise)?

 

Hitachi and Western Digital are both very big names in HDD manufacturing.

The price difference you mentioned may be due to a number of things, such as amount of cache, SATA speed, hard drive RPM, and any offers the hard drive manufacturer or retailer may have running at the time.

 

Thank-you for the information. Went back and found that two of the Western Digital HDDs have 32mb cache and one is SATA2, both are 7,200 rpm.

Hitachi is 16mb cache, SATA, 7,200 rpm.

Will the larger cache improve seek and access times?

 

No.

Larger caches do (if implemented properly) increase overall performance of the drive however... so you may percieve it as an improved seek / access time :-D. Hard drives have internal algorithms used to precache data, or leave data in the cache incase it is requested again. THey also use memory to store and reorganize commands as they come in to be as efficient as possible with head movement (this is what NCQ or native command queing does).

I remember reading an article a while back on THG that compared identicle drives with different caches (8/16) and the difference in real world performance was really negligable. Not sure if that still applies today or not, as this was probably more than a year ago.

 

Thanks guys, I got a Seagate 1TB w/32 mb cache for $20 more than the 500GB w/16 mb cache.

Plus the Seagate warranty is five years. :-D

Glad you guys are available to help us noobs. :wave

 

Ummm, there seems to be a serious contradiction there. You said "no", there would be no improvements in seek and access times, then immediately said "larger caches do increase overall performance". A drive's performance is determined using just a few criteria, with "seek" and "access" times for "reads" being 2 of the most important. So besides "writes", I don't see how someone's "perception" could be other than expected. That is, if a change in performance is noticed, it would be that the 32Mb drive is faster. :confused

The answer is definitely, "Yes". If all else is equal, two identical drives, one with 16Mb of cache, the other with 32Mb of cache, the 32Mb drive will have overall better performance specifications - without a doubt, no ifs, ands, or buts!

Whether you notice it or not is another matter, however, and perhaps that's what Howmanator was getting at. If you have a decent CPU and graphics card (pretty much anything above on-board graphics and entry level cards), lots of RAM, ample free disk space, AND a properly configured page file, any apparent performance improvement may likely be minimal, if noticeable at all - for most people, with notable exceptions - some games are very disk intensive, and drives used in file servers can benefit too. Booting up is obviously disk intensive so improvements can be seen there, until the OS, and security apps have "settled in".

There is a danger to larger caches, BTW - and that is if you have a power failure before the data in the buffer is written. But of course, everybody has their computer on a UPS, right?

 

Actually, we are both somewhat right and somewhat wrong, if you want to get uber technical. Hopefully, the OP got the gist of what I was trying to say however. Peope use the terms "Access Time" and "Seek Time" interchangably and there is a big difference. ANd apparently I was asleep at the wheel because thats what I did

The original question was:

FTR :

"Access Time" is the sum of seek time, transfer time and rotational delay of the disk. Cache size does not come into play when calculating Access Time.

"Seek Time" is the heads of the disc physically moving across the platters and how fast they can move to the correct place on the disk.

The poster specifically asked if the larger cache effects seek and access times. The point I was trying to convey was that cache size really has no effect on the amount of time required to move the head from one location to the next, or on rotational speed, as they are both phyiscal/mechanical limitations , and therefore, has no effect on Access Time.

And yes, UPS all the way.

 

Okay, there's some give and take here - but using your own definition, access times include transfer time, which is affected by buffer size - at least for large file transfers.

But still, this is splitting hairs as RAM, CPU and GPU horsepower, and proper PF and free disk space have a greater impact, for most people.

 

I'm always impressed when the system works (freely sharing ideas), both you guys have given me much to think about:clap

Thanks again, because your exchange opened up things I hadn't considered PF for instance.

BTW: The new rig is up and running.

Phenom ii X4 940 w/Vendetta 2 cooler (a lot of sweat went into the install:-D)

Asus M4A78 mobo

Seagate 1TB

4870 @512

Silverstone 600w

Cooler Master Centurion 590 case

PS. I built this because I began accumulating spare parts from upgrading my first build and also because I wanted a Vista system rather going through all that dual booting required:-D for a stable boot.