On pre order at OcUK if you look :)
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Thanks for the link TooNice, very interesting reading.
now i dont know the specifics of the cache used on hard drives, but with the size only slowly creeping up over the years (were just getting to 32MB with the 7k1000) wouldnt there be a place for a "performance" drive with a good chunk more? say 128MB?
I think 128mb would be overkill, performance gain won't justify the cost... Just like you won't (99% of users) really see a performance gain having more than 4gb of ram, I reckon have more than a certain amount of cache won't lead to any performance gain.
Maybe servers will benefit from 128mb cache - but then they would put it in SCSI drives...
the cost must be pretty much nothing tho... right?
and that RAMDRIVE thing that was knocking about a while back had some potential, so lets weld a gig of the stuff to a standard 7200RPM harddrive and see what happens?
IMO, if the cost is negligeable, and it is physically easy to implement (space wise), then they would have done it even for (if) negligeable performance gain. There is always the benefit of being able to put 128MB CACHE in bold on the box.. Perhaps what you are looking for is a hybrid drive?
I suspect that the future of the bleeding edge performance hard drives will be SSD based. At the moment, they are too small especially with Vista, and the transfer rate can not compare to the top end SCSI line. But I am sure the transfer rate will only increase from here on, at a faster pace than conventional HD can reduce it's access time.
Makes me wonder where Western Digital will eventually get with the Raptor. The Raptor is designed with more speed than space in mind, but if a competitor, be it SSD or hybrid manage to offer even better performance at the cost of space.. I am sure some enthusiasts would jump boat.
hybrid drives :D 256mb flash memory the new sammy laptop is going to have one will cost a bomb though because as normal with samsung it is a worlds first
If you are thinking of spending the money on raptors, you obviously have a little cash to throw around...
Get an Areca PCI-E raid controller and a number of 7200rpm drives and enjoy even better performance, plus redundancy ;)