[Bigfoot]

I was about to order another drive for audio (Pro Tools) and was wondering about buffer/cache size on various drives...

The 500gb Seagates I see at OWC are 32MB cache drives and the 500gb Western Digital's are 16MB. I poured over the drive specs on the Digi support page for the MacPro and see no reference to this spec so I don't know if it matters or not.

I was going to order another 500gb drive but the 1.0TB drives are pretty reasonably priced. Is either one more efficient for audio?

My 500gb Seagate 7200.11 is starting to make clucking noises on startup and want to head it off at the pass with new drive (this one is 32MB buffer).

1- Does the buffer/cache size matter for recording audio?
2- Suggestions... Seagate or Western? (the factory boot drive on my MacPro is a 320 gb Western Digital Caviar SE

[Simon]

From all I have seen so far 16 vs 32 MB cache does not make a significant difference. Although I'm a pro user, I don't use audio though.

The Seagate Barracuda drives are very nice but I have lost some faith in Seagate's desktop drives with the whole Barracuda 7200.11 firmware snafu.

WD Caviar are certainly excellent drives. If you're worried about heat/noise/power you should look at their Green series. If you're interested mainly in performance make sure to get the Black series.

Check this recent BareFeats comparison too.

[Bigfoot]

Thanks. After researching this a while, ended up ordering the WD black 500gb 32cache.