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Article: Focus on rpm and cache. (Hard Drive).
- Article from:
- Australian PC World
- Article date:
- June 1, 2003
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2003 IDG Communications Pty. Ltd - Australia. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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SPEED CHECK: for best performance, pick a hard drive with a rotational speed of 7200rpm, instead of one rated at 5400rpm. Visit the drive maker's Web site if the PC vendor's list of components doesn't specify the speed.
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CACHE IN: the hard drive's buffer size deserves scrutiny. The data you'll want next usually follows the data you just asked for, so hard drives gather more data than requested and store the extra amount in a buffer. This prepares the data for transfer to RAM without the PC's having to read the disk if data in the buffer is indeed requested next. An 8MB buffer will improve performance over a standard 2MB buffer.
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