8mg vs 2mg cache on Hard Drive [Archive]

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apsinger

04-10-2002, 05:48 PM

Western Digital has a newer hard drive that has an 8 meg cache instead of the industry standard 2. Is this a break through product or are we better off with the older type? Does processor speed matter? Have a PII 400 now. Want to do digital video primarily. Know anything about this new hard drive. Think it is a 100 Gig.

BipolarBill

04-10-2002, 08:22 PM

Read for yourself:

http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200201/20020124WD1200JB_1.html

It's a fantastic drive and performs as well as 10K RPM SCSI. I don't think that a 400Mhz CPU will hinder it.

otheos

04-11-2002, 03:34 PM

It's a fantastic drive and performs as well as 10K RPM SCSI

Well, it's the best IDE drive at the moment, but SCSI comes with so many benefits that IDE simply does not have. So while sustained transfer rates as well as total i/o is comparable, the WD is not competing directly (nor does it compare) to SCSI drives due to the differences of the protocols.

BipolarBill

04-11-2002, 03:53 PM

Oh no!! WD IDE is making Otheos nervous about his SCSI addiction! ;)

I love a noisy SCSI drive, myself. It sounds like - victory!

Here's another link.

http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/02q1/020305/index.html

Spoonman3z

04-11-2002, 05:01 PM

I actually have the HD you're talking about. It's the WD 1000JB (AKA 1000BB CHEO). The first one I got was DOA from googlegear but I got a replacement from WD and it works fine now.

The HD is pretty **** fast...and a much cheaper alternative to SCSI.

I think running a RAID 0 with 2x40 gig drives is faster than this one drive...but I doubt you will really notice the difference. If you're gonna do digital video the HD speed really wont matter when your bottleneck is the rest of the system - IE a 400mhz computer.

You'll prolly need an IDE card (since I doubt your mobo supports ATA 100) to reach the full potential of the drive.

apsinger

04-12-2002, 03:30 PM

Thanks for the links folks. Read them all. Hard to find any negatives about the drive. Guess my real issue lies with a PII 400. Think I can record Digital Video on the PII if I don't edit? Want to add a firewire and a large hard drive and burn all the data instead of editing. Thanks for thoughts!!