Another Hard Drive Question

[Ithryndil]

I was hoping to ask this in my other thread, but that was closed...

My question is this:
If I get a SATA 3.0 GB/s hard drive, would that be faster than my current hard drive: ST3200021A (200 GB, 7200 RPM, Ultra-ATA/100)

If it is faster, will the difference be noticeable?

 

[carnageX]

SATA is more of a new interface, rather than speed difference. When I switched from an IDE to a SATA, however, I noticed a small bit of increase in boot time on my previous HP computer.

 

[Ithryndil]

Ok. Thank you.

 

[carnageX]

No problem.

 

[tomc102968]

the rpm is speed in your case 7200 the other choice is 10000 rpm but there is a jump in price but as the the other one pointed out you should see some increase

 

[carnageX]

I cant say that a few second shaved off of boot time/app load time justifies the price increase on 10k rpm drives.

 

[Ithryndil]

Ok...it makes sense that the higher the RPM the faster it's probably going to go...that being said I did have a few questions regarding the following:

# Cache: 16MB
# Average Seek Time: 8.9ms
# Average Write Time: 10.9ms
# Average Latency: 4.2ms

I know that for the last three, the lower the times, the better, however, what about the cache? If you have two nearly identical hard drives, and one has 16mb cache, but the other has 32 mb cache, which is better (disregarding price)?

 

[carnageX]

The 32mb cache is much better. That means it can store more temporary read data there, and it does speed up the drive quite a bit.