External HDD: 8mb or 16mb cache?

[manning1]

i always recommend the highest amount of cache..ie..16mb.
particularly for larger track counts.
but these two drives i dont own.
cache is but one aspect. but an important one.
unless you find out who actually manufactures the drive in those units.
seagate/maxtor/wd/samsung etc and see various specs its difficult to comment further.
the only solution is to run tests with each useing your own daw system.

[hduncan]

The Otherworldcomputing.com drive uses a Hitachi travelstar, and the Gtechs seem to use all hitachis as well but it doesnt specify for the Gdrive mini, I sent in an email asking..

can firewire 800 even make use of the SATA II new speeds?

[hduncan]

gtech uses exclusively hitatchi drives.

[mwd]

SATA I and SATA II are committees that make recommendations on protocols.

Keeping perspective:
50 MBps (400 Mbps) - FireWire 400 (1394a)
60 MBps (480 Mbps) - USB 2.0
100 MBbs (800 Mbps) - FireWire 800 (1394b)
150 MBps (1200 Mbps) - SATA 1.5
300 MBps (2400 Mbps) - SATA 3.0

You're probably dealing with drives that have a throughput of 60 ~ 85 MBps tops.

So you won't notice any difference between 150 or 300 SATA.

Of all the things you mention the cache is probably the most important. I would choose 16MB over 8MB.

Real life disk failure due to heat is rare.

[tsvisser]

just to interject... cache is generally important... sort of acts like a flywheel - allows momentary lapses in the ability for the hard drive to physically keep up with data I/O, but with streaming content, such as audio and video, cache becomes a little bit less important, because ultimately it is the long term sustained rates that are more important. cache generally helps with short term burst speeds.

like mentioned, SATA I vs SATA II should have no real world differences in single drive interfaces. it is not until you start using expanders, chaining multiple drives on a single serial lane does the interface speed come into play.

honestly, I'd look at 3.5" 7200RPM solutions. both that you mention are 2.5" HDD solutions. you would loose the ability to buss power the drive (can be extremely important), but generally, 3.5" desktop based drives are cheaper, ultimately allow for larger capacities, and are higher performance. the down side is that they are physically larger and require external power to operate.

[hduncan]

I dont think I can afford to drop the bus-powered thing. I am on a macbook pro and am going to use this external drive for housing my samples for music production.

I like being able to create music on the go, working on it whenever I have free time, so I think having the bus powered is necessary. thanks for the info!

anyone have experience with OWC or GTech drives? more specifically, the mercury on the go drive and the g-drive mini?

[mds]

I really like the G-tech stuff...its usually either that or Rocstor for me...

I know what you're saying about the bus powered thing. I have tooo many external drives, but I have a bus powered drive for on the go work. I've had one experience where the drive was slowing things down: BIG 96k video session with large Quicktime movies and all session files coming off a 90% full bus powered drive. It just couldn't hack it...otherwise they've worked well for me...

I'd probably opt for the 16MB cache...

Mike