What's the difference between 8 MB and 16 MB Cache on a hard drive? [duplicate]

Tom's Hardware has a pretty good collection of harddrive benchmarks, pick your drives and see for yourself.

p.s. i remember reading somewhere that you won't notice any difference between 8 and 16 Mb cache in normal HDD use.

Here's the article i was talking about.

p.p.s: i found the benchmark that fits your case - draw your own conclusions.

The cache is RAM that's used as a buffer to hold read and write information for the CPU to process. It is definitely noticeable. The larger the buffer, the more information can be held for processing. Assuming your CPU can keep up with it all (more than likely) you will notice it.

The difference in speed is more noticeable for external hard disks. But for an internal hard disk, because the operating system's disk cache is much larger than 16MB and its strategy for handling operations on the disk is different, the speed difference should be somewhat less noticeable.

Please note the emphasis on "less noticeable", because the difference in speed is still there. But to you as a user it's less important if the disk is a bit slower, since the computer is still available even if the disk keeps on turning in the background.