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Questions tagged [hard-drive-cache]

Harddrive cache is a relative small cache on a hard drive.

Harddrive cache is a relative small cache on a hard drive.

This allows the drive to communicate at full interface speed while writing at slower of more opportune moment to the platters.

Example with queues: 1) Please write item A (somewhere on the outer tracks. 2) Please write item B (somewhere on the INNER tracks. 3) Please write item C (somewhere on the outer tracks.

Having a cache allows the drive to accept all three commands, but internally change the write order so both outer track writes are done sequentially.

A typical HDD cache from 2015 is about 64MB.

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Does hard drive buffer size matter?

These HDDs will be used mostly for backups and data-storage (pictures, movies) which aren't often read. The price difference is 1.5 Euros in the case of these two: HDD Western Digital Caviar Green Power 500GB, 7200rpm, 32MB, SATA2 HDD Western…
Jakob Cosoroaba
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Is "Turn Off Windows write-cache buffer flushing" safe on a laptop?

my laptop's internal harddrive is a bit slow. I looked at the drive properties and there are two options: [X] Enable write caching on the device [ ] Turn off windows write-cache buffer flushing on the device As you can see, the first option is…
Earlz
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What is the whole function and effect of "Turn off Windows write-cache buffer flushing on the device"

In Windows 7, using the Device Manager, bringing up the properties of a disk, and going to the Policies tab, there are 2 switch items. The write cache, which this question it not about. and [X] Turn off Windows write-cache buffer flushing on the…
Psycogeek
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What is Btrfs's disk space caching?

I noticed in my syslog that BTRFS reports enabling "disk space caching". What is Btrfs's "disk space caching"?
Geremia
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Why does an Intel RST RAID 1 array write faster with write-back cache disabled?

I have two HDDs (5900 RPM) in RAID 1 (mirror). I know, I know, it's painfully slow. I'm currently in the process of replacing them with faster drives, hence this question while I'm testing things. For some reason, disabling write-back caching in the…
Bob
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What's the difference between 8 MB and 16 MB Cache on a hard drive?

I'm looking to replace a dead hard drive in an older notebook. The current (bad) hard drive is a Toshiba 60 GB 5400 RPM HDD with 16 MB cache. It's very difficult to find replacement ATA-100 notebook drives with 16 MB cache. Do I even need this…
Nathan DeWitt
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Is it possible to use one large SSD as both system disk and Intel Smart Response caching

I want to use a large SSD to install system on it and also use it for Intel Smart Response caching? Start with 120G SSD and 1TB HDD Take a 120G SSD and split it into 100G and 20G partitions. Install system on 100G SSD disk Enable Intel Smart…
xsaero00
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Disable Linux Page Cache for Reads

Is there a way to turn-off page caching for reads in Linux? More specifically, I would like my processes to read directly from the disk. The setting of my problem: I am trying out new query processing techniques in Postgres and measuring their…
vahid
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Does hard drive cache size matter in a RAID?

Possible Duplicate: Does hard drive buffer size matter? Ok, so not a RAID exactly, but I just bought a drive-less Drobo to use as raw storage for video/photo work and am now browsing hard drives to put into it. In most cases there's a pretty big…
Andrew
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Windows 7 freezes with high disk activity

I have a Windows 7 computer that I use almost exclusively for streaming video (Hulu in Internet Explorer, or recorded or live broadcast TV with Windows Media Center). Often the computer freezes for a number of seconds. The hard disk light is on…
Cliff
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What's the use of windows hard disk write cache when the hard drive already has more than 8 megabytes of cache?

Doesn't a hard drive use its cache with high utilization? I see up to 20MB/s difference on file writes when I disable windows disk write cache. Does anybody know why cache size matters this much?
Uğur Gümüşhan
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'cache swap' filesystem for SSD/HDD combo?

As we all know, Solid State Drives (SSD) are expensive ($/Gb) but they are quick to access. I'm wondering if there exists a sort of software-kernel-level 'cache swap' filesystem technology; the idea of such filesystem is that it keeps a cache of…
Meex3300
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Is write caching good for HDDs' life?

I have a removable HDD for which Windows disabled write-caching by default, but on occasions I write a lot of data to that HDD and I was wondering, would enabling the caching temporarily improve the HDD's longevity?
f.ardelian
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Disable all disk cache features in Windows 7

I am doing benchmarking of several algorithms involving read/write to disk. As Windows provides some cache features, sometimes I get results like these : first run of the algorithm : 200 seconds second run of the algorithm : 90 seconds third run of…
Basj
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What cache makes a file search faster for the second time exactly?

On Windows on a HDD partition with Total Commander, if I make a file search on the file system root e.g. C:\, it will take considerable time: it display as it walks the entire directory structure (seemingly depth-first). However if I do another…
n611x007
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