Replacing Harddrives

[muddyfox470]

My samsung harddrives have seemingly been on the way out for a while, diabolical reports on HDTUNE (10mb/s) and some nasty clicking noises (followed by large pauses in videos whilst being watched). They were SAMSUNG SATA2 HD501LJ and they both seem to be dire in performance compared to what I should be expecting. [So I need to buy some replacement ones while these go for RMA]

Anyway Scan have some excellent prices on at the moment, and I was looking at replacing them with the Hitachi 7k1000.b (newer revision) and they seem to be up there as performers. However everyone is interested in the TB harddrives so it's hard to gauge the performance of the 750Gb drive.

http://www.scan.co.uk/product.aspx?ProductId=28524

Hard drive Name: Deskstar 7K1000.B (Product home page)
Model number: HDT721075SLA380
Part number: 0A38111
Capacity: 750 GB
Rotational speed (RPM): 7200
Interface: Serial ATA
Interface variant: 3Gb/s
Form factor: 3.5"
Cache size: 8 MB
Description: Generic

How well should they perform even though they only have 8mb of cache. Am I right in thinking that the cache only affects files less than the cache size, i.e. performance shouldn't be a massive hit with most day to day stuff?

Please let me know asap as I'm looking to buy soon - i.e. before the today only special finishes

Regards

[shbris]

if ur using it for video playback any current HDD will be fine, 8mb is sufficient. gaming and databases etc need more

[muddyfox470]

That's the thing its going to be mixed use. I normally get 2 harddrives, and have 6 partitions between them all.

I play on Cod4 etc when I can, so will 8mb cache really hurt gaming that much?

Is it best I just go for 1 750gb now then and use that whilst the others are being replaced - my cas can only hold 2 HDDs anyway.

Thanks for your reply

[muddyfox470]

Has anyone got first hand experience of these Hitachi 7K100.B with 8mb cache ?