Hard drive advice needed

[radiospace]

I'm researching external hard drives to host my samples, including VSL Solo Strings. Using Kontakt 2, Mac OSX Tiger.

I've narrowed it down to a couple of models (both triple interface Firewire 800/400/USB 2), one of which (the new Maxtor drive) has 16 MB cache, while the other has an 8 MB cache. Is this difference going to have any practical effect on my performance for streaming samples? Apart from the cache difference I somewhat favor the other drive because it holds an extra 100 GB, but if the 16 MB cache might have a dramatic effect on the performance of my sample playback perhaps I should choose the Maxtor. What do you think?

[hetoreyn]

I think the cache memory makes a difference. especially in the case of VSL, but then again, my internal drives are only 2mb, and 8mb cache and if your running your external drive on USB2 or Firewire 800 then that would make up for any short fall.

Lacie do an external drive (specifically for audio work) that is a 500GB drive (Costs £330) that is also triple interface, I don't know if it's 16mb, probably not but I have used a Maxtor 200GB (2mb cache) for my VSL projects and that worked nicely so I don't think you need worry as long as it has 8mb or above.

My three pennies worth!

Hetoreyn

[PolarBear]

I don't think the cache size is too important, the main factor for streaming off samples is seek time, and with that almost all drives with the same speed are about the same.

Hope this helps,
PolarBear

[Nick Batzdorf]

I'd be more inclined to look at the drive's warranty rather than its cache size.

[irvind]

@Nick Batzdorf said:

I'd be more inclined to look at the drive's warranty rather than its cache size.

Heh heh, I don't know anything about cache sizes, but those sound like wise words...!

[cm]

cache size is not an issue - big caches are usefull if you want to load a complete file, sampling needs always (tiny) portions of many wave files so most of the cached data will be thrown away after reading the needed part of the file.
in case you have serial ATA disks the more important feature is tagged command queuing (TCQ) or it's (marketing-)brother native command queuing (NCQ) - it will reduce the seek time significantly (approximately from 9 to 4.5 ms)
please note the first sATA2 drives are available (3 Gb/s) and some sATA controllers need the jumpers on those harddrives set to 1.5 Gb/s to recognize them properly
christian