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Date:	Wed, 4 Jun 2003 10:54:37 PDT7
From:	"J. R. Fox" <jr_fox@pacbell.net >
Reply-To:	scoug-help@scoug.com
To:	scoug-help@scoug.com
Subject:	SCOUG-Help: Re:

Content Type: text/plain

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Steve wrote:

> Memory prices have dropped so much that HD manufacturers
> are now including larger caches on their high-end offerings.
> Soon, 8MB caches will be standard.

> As file sizes increase, larger caches become more useful. I'm
> considering an IBM 120GB drive for my wife's win98 machine.
> Today, the difference between a 2MB and 8MB cache is around
> $12 on PriceWatch -- a small price to pay for obsolescence
> protection and the (small) potential performance increase.

Are they only available on the larger HDs ? I'm also wondering
what may have happened vis-a-vis the 15K/rpm drives. Even if
they did offer a noticeable improvement over the 10K's (and I
*can* tell you that a 10K smokes a 5400 or even a 7200, for many
things performance related -- well worth it, at least to me) the
price premium on the 15K's was kind of ridiculous. Plus, I don't
know if spinning the platters that fast had some negative impact
on reliability or durability.

> It's not clear to me that there is significant operating system
> influence on the HD hardware caches size choice, save that the
> largest possible HPFS software cache is 2MB -- small by today's
> standards. [HPFS 386 does allow up to 64MB I've read].

If OS/2 can't make use of the larger cache size (last time I checked,
HPFS 386 still cost a bundle, and there can't be many end-users
running it), this won't ever benefit us, except while booted into
another OS.

Jordan

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