Harddrive buffer question

[believo]

Whats the difference between 16mb buffer and 8mb buffer on a SATA harddrive?

thanks!

 

[CanadaRAM]

Whats the difference between 16mb buffer and 8mb buffer on a SATA harddrive?

thanks!

Aproximately 8 Mb....

In theory a larger buffer will be able to return data to the computer faster, in the case where the program goes back to the same data repeatedly. The 16 Mb would be faster than an 8 Mb in usage situations where the data being used was greater than 8 Mb ad less than 16 Mb. So alol else being equal, 16 is better than 8.

However: any real-world performance situation, the benefit is highly dependant on the way the OS and the software use the hard drive, and the other performance characteristics of the hard drive. And of course waiting for hard drive access is just a fraction of the time the machine spends doing things. So real-world performance difference will vary from zero to a minor speed up. Certainly nothing like the speed difference you'd see going from 512 Mb to 1 Gb RAM, or 5400 to 7200 RPM hard drive.

A computer is a series of bottlenecks. If you relieve one bottleneck, it will improve performance only up to the point that the next bottleneck provides the restriction.