Questions about hdd cache

[Galion]

I've never really looked at the hdds I have used, today I realized my western digital black hdds have different cache amounts. 

Western Digital Black 7200rpm 16mb 2.5inch 2tb 

Western Digital Black 7200rpm 64mb 3.5 inch 2tb

 

Questions 

Having less cache will it affect it's performance ? 

Will it affect it's lifespan? 

 

[SansVarnic]

1 minute ago, Galion said:

Questions 

Having less cache will it affect it's performance ? 

Will it affect it's lifespan?

Yes, but only if the files you are accessing is of large size.

No

[191x7]

A larger cache affects performance, especially for longer reads or writes. Also, the 3.5" HDD should be faster, not just due to the larger cache size.

[Galion]

7 minutes ago, SansVarnic said:

Yes, but only if the files you are accessing is of large size.

No

Is 2-4gb files considered big??

[mariushm]

Dude, the cache won't affect  large file transfers.

Think of it like this : you have 100 pictures in a folder and they're all 30-500 KB in size and you double click on one to view it in your image viewer.

The hard drive has to move the read heads to the track where the image is and starts reading it, but as long as it's positioned there on that track it keeps reading the whole track as the disc spins inside and puts the whole content of the track in the cache... that track contents could be 2, 5, 10 MB, maybe more.

If a few seconds later you hit the next picture button on your image viewer and the next image happens to be stored immediately after the first image on the hard drive, then the image is already read in the cache, so the hard drive doesn't have to spin the motor, move the heads to the track, read the chunk of data and serve it, it can read it directly from cache.

Same way, let's say you open a text file in notepad and change a few words and hit save ... when you do that notepad tells the hard drive to go to that file at a specific position and write the changed characters ... the hard drive can simply put the characters in cache and wait until more data is accumulated and only then it spins the motor, position itself at all the various tracks and empties the cache.

It's helpful to save power in laptops by turning off the motor as often as possible, it can help applications who constantly read small bits of data, and for caching writes.

When you copy large files, it's just straight reading files from the discs you speed is limited by how fast the discs inside spin and how dense the bits are packed on the platters (discs) inside the hard drive.

 

[SupaKomputa]

The cache will store most frequent file used up to the cache size. So if you're using smaller data often it won't have to pull it from the platter, just use a cache.

Large files will just go straight to the memory.

 

Having less cache will it affect it's performance ? In general yes.

Will it affect it's lifespan? Nope.

[SansVarnic]

53 minutes ago, Galion said:

Is 2-4gb files considered big??

Yes and no but cache is not used for large file transfers, mostly commonly used directory and small executable files.

 

Also as explained by these previous replies.

39 minutes ago, mariushm said:

<snip>

2 minutes ago, SupaKomputa said:

<snip>

 

Your drives will live out their normal life span.

[Galion]

15 minutes ago, SansVarnic said:

Yes and no but cache is not used for large file transfers, mostly commonly used directory and small executable files.

 

Also as explained by these previous replies.

 

Your drives will live out their normal life span.

Thanks everyone