Hard Drive Spec Question

[harrycary]

i just have a question
is the cache made of flash memory or is it something else?

I'm not sure. They use either RAM or ROM chips. Maybe the mfg site can better answer that. Tomshardware.com may also be of some help. I would guess that it is RAM chips though.

whatever computer you're using, no matter how big the hd, you should defrag at least once every 2 weeks. when its been as long as 2 months, you can actually see your computer getting slower and a 40 gig HD can take up to an hour to completely defrag

The savvy user will partition a harddrive so the O/S and data are separated. This way defragmenting goes real quick and your data is protected if your O/S crashes.

btw,
i have a 256mb (flash memory) mp3 player which i can store any type of file on it. maybe its just the USB cable that takes so long, but its really slow. to transfer a full 256 mb takes up to 6 min.

The throughput speed of a USB port isn't as good as the bus speed on your motherboard(and that will change in the future). It's an inherent problem with USB drives. Manufacturers tried solving this with USB 2.0 which is faster.

peace

[lynx]

Originally posted by quiksilver_aus@3 December 2003 - 04:38
is the cache made of flash memory or is it something else?

No, it is just standard memory.

Flash memory keeps it's contents when power is removed, but is relatively slow and expensive.

There's no need to keep anything in cache when power is removed since it is permanently stored on the disk, so standard (possibly ddr) memory is used.

[bigdawgfoxx]

Thanks for all the input! Does anyone have a link to one of these "Solid State" harddrives..Id kinda like to see them.

[Evil Gemini]

Originally posted by bigdawgfoxx@4 December 2003 - 05:16
Thanks for all the input! Does anyone have a link to one of these "Solid State" harddrives..Id kinda like to see them.

So with a solid state, the speed would be deteremnd by the clock speeds of the memory used like ram ???

[lynx]

They've just started advertising solid state drives on TV in the UK. Also called memory sticks. The are pretty small and quite expensive at the moment, but I suppose that will change. Biggest I've seen is 1GB.

At the moment, transfer is via USB 2.0, but I don't know whether that is the limiting factor on speed, or the speed of the memory inside.

I suppose that if it had a fast bus speed, the clock speed of the memory used would determine it's transfer rate just the same as standard memory.