How Much Of A Noticeable Speed Difference With These Two Drives?

I just built an old pc over the weekend out of spare parts. It currently has a 2MB buffer 5200rpm 20GB hdd [It's a pata drive not sata]. I just wanted to know how much of a faster speed difference if any, would be noticeable with the following drives:

1. 7200RPM 8MB Buffer 160GB PATA HDD
2. 7200RPM 16MB Buffer 500GB PATA HDD

I'd like to know if I'd notice a speed increase...

 

I think the second drive would be faster. More cache

 

Ya, of course #2 will be faster but noticeable? Since this is an older PC with PATA drives I can't see you doing something intense with it that it would really make a difference. I'd buy the drive you need for size/cost and not for speed.

Either one blows the 5200 out of the water.

 

I've never noticed any difference in performance based on hard drive cache size. Not to say there isn't - I still hold to the credo that the more the better when it comes to memory . . . but if there is any increase in performance it is probably only noticeable in benchmarking tests and the like.

Then cost might be an issue; if two drives have the same storage capacity, but the higher buffer amount is greatly more expensive, then I'd go with the lower buffer size. If the same or just a bit more, I'd have to get the higher buffer . . . I'm just wired that way, I guess :-D

But going from 5200 to 7200rpm? Oh, yeah - you will notice a nice increase in over-all performance. I used to have an old "Performance Test" benchmark that compared an old drive to a new 7200 one; the read/write speeds alone were vastly improved. All the other benchmarks were improved to a greater or lessor degree. You will notice it.

 

I would say #2 double the cash at 16 but more importantly a much larger platter the data is held on witch in turn means more data clusters are held together.

look up some real world benchmarks of a 150 hdd vs 500 hdd vs 1000 hdd with the same specs you might be surprised by the results

 

I don't think that's a clear explanation of the characterisitic of larger hard drives that can contribute to faster reads and writes. What you mean is that more data clusters on the hard drive are packed into a smaller area. The result is that the read/write head on the hard drive needs to move around less, or cover less hard drive surface, to read/write the equivalent number of clusters than on a smaller hard drive where clusters are spread out more.