[Casper Crane]

I am about to buy a Lacie FW Hard Drive, but I can't decide which to get.

With my education discount + $20 .Mac renewal coupon, I can get the 120GB for $149.

With the 6th anniversary coupon, I can get the 200GB drive for $235, with the added bonus that it's an 8MB Buffer.

I will be using this for DV editing, and don't really need the extra 80GB, but it can't hurt, right?

My question is: how much difference will it make to have 8MB Buffer vs. 2MB buffer?

This is what will tip the scales.

CC

[iohead]

Originally posted by Casper Crane:
I am about to buy a Lacie FW Hard Drive, but I can't decide which to get.

With my education discount + $20 .Mac renewal coupon, I can get the 120GB for $149.

With the 6th anniversary coupon, I can get the 200GB drive for $235, with the added bonus that it's an 8MB Buffer.

I will be using this for DV editing, and don't really need the extra 80GB, but it can't hurt, right?

My question is: how much difference will it make to have 8MB Buffer vs. 2MB buffer?

This is what will tip the scales.

CC

This is a somewhat diabolical question.

The safe answer is that "it depends on your work load" (the kind of things that you would do with your disk), but that's hardly a useful answer.

If you are doing lots of random reads or writes, then the cache cannot help you. It only helps if what you want to read is already there. It's not the reading from the platters that takes most of the time, it's the seeking.

Then again, if you are trying to read files that are much larger than the cache, the cache will get overwritten repeatedly and is not of much help.

A lot depends on the cache circuitry that implements the *policy* (what to cache, how to cache, how long to keep, etc.)

That said, empirical evidence shows that unless your workload is contrived, 16 MB or 8 MB would pretty much be the same. 8 MB might be better than 2 MB in *more scenarios*, but your disk performance would not be 4x better! It won't even be substantially better in most "normal" cases.

For DV editing, you would typically be reading/writing huge files, often sequentially. The buffer size would usually not matter too much, if at all.

The bottomline still is that "more" can't hurt (almost all the time) when it comes to memory/cache/disk, so if you aren't paying a lot just for the sake of the cache - get more. Otherwise, whatever's fine.

-A

[Casper Crane]

Thanks. That was very helpful answer. I was confused by what you were saying at first, due to my hard disk technical ignorance, but you made a clear point at the end, which is that it shouldn't matter much for DV, but go better if you can.

Thanks.

[Stogieman]

Originally posted by Casper Crane:

With my education discount + $20 .Mac renewal coupon, I can get the 120GB for $149.

How did you get your .mac renewal coupon to work with an education discount. The education section on the online store doesn't recognize the coupon.

[tooki]

Honestly, I don't think the buffer size makes much of a difference.

tooki

[Casper Crane]

Originally posted by Stogieman:
How did you get your .mac renewal coupon to work with an education discount. The education section on the online store doesn't recognize the coupon.

You're right. I just discovered that. Oh well, I guess I will be getting the 120GB after all, especially after hearing from you folks.

Thanks.

CC