Why don't they put 64MB cache?

#1: because it really wouldn't change performance much at all. According to reviews, anything over 16mb is really overkill for most applications.

got cancled the WD 500Gb for 89 bucks earlier this week and im thinking about getting this one. Anyone have any advice ?

#3 - Yeah, get an eye patch.

- What?

- An eye patch man. Get one.

Yes, $150 is less than newegg's $155... but not that much that I'd be jumping up and posting it to a site.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136131

If you want to take a chance, newegg has the open box ones for $142
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136131R

Either way, it's a great drive and is at or near the top of all the performance charts I've seen.

Does anyone know the actual throughput?

#6, I reckon Your PC would know...

A Tad under 20 cents per gig.

Which applications aren't the ones that wouldn't benefit from more than a 16MB cache, #2?

its kinda ridiculous to think about cost per gig. I am running out of drive space all the time and if I could get another gig for 20 cents the instant the low drive space notification pops up, i would always do it.. does that mean storage cost has fallen below the inconvenience of ever deleting anything?

What's the warantee on these things? I've been sticking with Seagate drives because theirs have been longer for a while now. Is that still the case?

These have 3 year warranties. Enterprise versions have 5 year warranties iirc. I have two of these 750GigaBiters. Mine are quiet. Formatted space is 698GB.

#9

It's Computer Science: the statistics are that if you suck in a ton of stuff into the cache, you'll likely throw most of it away in the next 2-5 seconds anyway. Remember, the drive controller knows nothing of the file system. So if you have 1 Kb text file that you are editing and the controller goes ahead and reads ahead (and caches) 1Mb, say, you've just wasted a lot of effort since you only need the 1 Kb (actually one disk cluster). CS grad students in the 70's did tons of research papers on this topic.

I feel strange - my first non-snarky post.

WB

Just goes to show how gullible people are when it comes to 32MB cache and 5-year warranties. BFD!

#5 - the refurb is more like $143, plus $6 s/h makes it $149. I'd rather spend the extra $6 and get the new one, from Newegg and not Fry's--Fry's can suck my balls.

The larger cache sizes usually don't come into play until they get a lot larger like SSD or HHDs size. until then, the price performance ratio is extremely poor. Of course we'd all like more cache if it were the same price though, who wouldn't (unless you're extreme green and worried about each milliwatt).

WD has a terrible track record of reliability, at least as far as I'm concerned. Until recently I hadn't purchased and WD drives since 2003, when I had 8 out of 8 WD drives die in a row, each in less than 1 year from purchase. A few weeks ago I broke down and purchased 2 WD drives. One of them died within hours of installing. I get it: nothing new. No more WD for me, ever.

#16: I have a few of these drives: both 750s and 500s, including several in 24/7 operation for more than a year and have had no failures. I think WD has turned the corner on reliability. I've had much worse luck with Seagates -- especially the 7200.10. These are my drives of choice right now since Fry's always seems to have the OEM 750s for $150-$170 and the 500s for around $100.

Thanks, #13. Now I know that I don't need a 64MB cache to work with a 1kb text file. What about working with a 80 MB 15-layered .tif in Photoshop?

#18
You shouldn't have any part of that file on disk when working on it, it should ALL be in main memory(even figuring the old 4x usage, that's only 300meg of ram, and really, who runs Photoshop in under 2gig).

The disk speed will only come to play on saving and loading the file.
-jsp

18:

Sheesh. Large files have little impact on these statistics since you are not hitting save or load every two seconds. The OS *is* writing junk (normally little stuff except when you thrashing as you would editing an 80 Mb file on a 64 Mb machine, such as it sounds like you have). The little stuff is browser cookies, application MRU file lists, process status, etc. This little stuff impacts that cache more than a large streaming read or write. Finally, an 80 Mb file read will cause *all* of the file to be transferred to memory and the controller cache entries for the file to be marked as dirty. As a guess, more that 95% of the disk I/O requests are less than 64Kb in size.

Life is probability - you need a 64 Mb cache like another hole in the head.

WB