More questions about HDD's

[Bad Aim]

Yesterday I was just about to buy the Western Digital 8TB Black hard drive. Before I made my purchase, I noticed something. The 8TB hard drives comes in two flavors. One of them has 128MB of cache, the other has 256MB of cache.

Scanning Western Digital's page, they of course said that the 256MB drive was for gaming purposes. Of course they did, they are trying to get me to spend more money on a hard drive.

So I did some research of my own, going to various tech sites and to my surprise, all of them said that if you are buying a mechanical hard drive for gaming, you are going to want as much cache as the drive will offer.

The WD Black 8TB with the 256MB cache is going for $279.99. On the other hand, the 8TB Black with only 128MB cache is going for a lot cheaper, $179.99. Then there is the 10TB Black, that one only has 256MB cache and is going for $249.99.

So, is cache really all that important? Should I go for the 10TB Black drive? Or will 128MB cache for a 8TB hard drive going to not cause any lag. From what I was reading, the more cache memory a drive has, the faster it can bring up the necessary files needed to run your game smoothly.

Thank you for your time and patience with me.

[Cathulhu]

Yes, the cache will have a big impact on performance.
Same with the Cache on SSDs. Cacheless SSDs can be as slow or even slower than HDDs compared to SSDs with Cache.

[_I_]

more cache is better
it will massively increase write speeds, and help some with reads, reading entire file when only part is needed, and the rest is available if requested later

[Illusion of Progress]

I'm not sure if the above replies read the thread fully or not, but while cache can be important, no, not enough to spend an extra $100 to go from 128 MB to 256MB. That's insane.

[Bad Aim]

Publicado originalmente por Illusion of Progress:

I'm not sure if the above replies read the thread fully or not, but while cache can be important, no, not enough to spend an extra $100 to go from 128 MB to 256MB. That's insane.

I agree with that. But I do have the option of going for the 10TB WD Black. That drive has 256MB option at $249.99. And going from a WD Black 8TB with 128MB cache ($179.99) to a 10TB WD Black with 256MB cache seems like it is worth it.

Do you agree? Or should I go for the 8TB with 128MB cache at $179.99?

[Illusion of Progress]

Yeah, that was sort of my way of saying the 8 TB 256MB drive shouldn't be considered at all.

Per the question of whether to get 8 TB or 10 TB drive, that's your call. I mentioned it your last thread that the 8 TB drive is a better value at the prices you gave, but that is going purely on price/capacity (the 20 TB has a $22 premium on top of it if trying to even them out). but maybe you could count that as going towards the cache bump and it evens out. I'd get the 10 TB if you need the space but I'd probably go for the 8TB, and here's why.

Personally, if I'm spending $250 on an HDD for games, I'm probably going to pause and give a hard look at a 4 TB SSD instead. You can get those for less than that. It used to be an HDD gave you four times the capacity, but that's slipped to between two and three times now, and it's mostly true for the"storage" HDDs like the 5xx0 RPM ones. The 7,200 RPM HDDs aren't worth it anymore (because you now only get maybe twice the capacity or not even that anymore), and I've been saying this for a while. But that's just my opinion, so it's your call. Value-wise, either the 8 TB or 10 TB are fine just compared to each other.

[_I_]

generally a 4+tb 7200rpm hdd will be able to max out the sata3 controller
sata ssd will be slightly faster, but still be limited by the controller (for large read/writes)
for small randoms any ssd is much faster than any hdd

imho, if going to add another ssd, make sure the board has a free nvme slot for it
save the sata ports for large hdd for backups or games that dont need fast random reads
no mmo or open world games, just sp linear story games

[Bad Aim]

Publicado originalmente por Illusion of Progress:

Yeah, that was sort of my way of saying the 8 TB 256MB drive shouldn't be considered at all.

Per the question of whether to get 8 TB or 10 TB drive, that's your call. I mentioned it your last thread that the 8 TB drive is a better value at the prices you gave, but that is going purely on price/capacity (the 20 TB has a $22 premium on top of it if trying to even them out). but maybe you could count that as going towards the cache bump and it evens out. I'd get the 10 TB if you need the space but I'd probably go for the 8TB, and here's why.

Personally, if I'm spending $250 on an HDD for games, I'm probably going to pause and give a hard look at a 4 TB SSD instead. You can get those for less than that. It used to be an HDD gave you four times the capacity, but that's slipped to between two and three times now, and it's mostly true for the"storage" HDDs like the 5xx0 RPM ones. The 7,200 RPM HDDs aren't worth it anymore (because you now only get maybe twice the capacity or not even that anymore), and I've been saying this for a while. But that's just my opinion, so it's your call. Value-wise, either the 8 TB or 10 TB are fine just compared to each other.

Just out of curiosity, do you remember the Western Digital Raptor? Back in the day, I was convinced that the 10k RPM was going to be the future of gaming.

[Bad Aim]

Publicado originalmente por _I_:

generally a 4+tb 7200rpm hdd will be able to max out the sata3 controller
sata ssd will be slightly faster, but still be limited by the controller (for large read/writes)
for small randoms any ssd is much faster than any hdd

imho, if going to add another ssd, make sure the board has a free nvme slot for it
save the sata ports for large hdd for backups or games that dont need fast random reads
no mmo or open world games, just sp linear story games

I am looking to downsize the HDD's that I have. I have two 1TB WD Blacks, one 2TB WD Green, and a 2TB WD Black. If I get the 8TB or 10TB HDD then I can remove the two 1TB WD Blacks, maybe even the Green as well. This will allow for better air flow through the computer, less power consumption, and give me 2 or 3 external drives to use as strictly backup until I can afford to start working on my private server.

[_I_]

10krpm drives were faster, but depending on the size and platter count, its seq read/write speeds were still limited

newer higher data density 7200 or 5x00 rpm drives can seq read faster than the older 10k just due to that, bits going by the head faster
new drives also have more sectors on the outer rim of the drive, than at the center

only advantage of 10k was seek times, moving to position was about the same, but waiting for the platter to spin to where the data is, could trim off a few ms
10krpm = 6ms per rev
7200rpm = 8.3ms per rev
5400rpm = 11ms per rev

[Bad Aim]

Publicado originalmente por _I_:

10krpm drives were faster, but depending on the size and platter count, its seq read/write speeds were still limited

newer higher data density 7200 or 5x00 rpm drives can seq read faster than the older 10k just due to that, bits going by the head faster
new drives also have more sectors on the outer rim of the drive, than at the center

only advantage of 10k was seek times, moving to position was about the same, but waiting for the platter to spin to where the data is, could trim off a few ms
10krpm = 6ms per rev
7200rpm = 8.3ms per rev
5400rpm = 11ms per rev

Forgive me.

I was not attempting to say that the old Raptor drives were better, only that at the time I was convinced that hard drives were just going to get faster and faster. I did not foresee NVMe drives. I knew that flash drives were a thing, of course, but I never expected that they could become as large as they are now and that they could be mounted inside a computer via SATA.

My comment was more of an observation about how very wrong I was back then.

[Cathulhu]

That's where diminishing return kicks in, aka physical limits.

And these days SSDs often do not use SATA as that interface is too slow. They use NVME instead, which lets them use the way faster PCIe lanes.

SATA is at best 6 Gigabit. Which is about 768 Megabytes per second.

My NVME drive has speeds in Gigabytes per second. It would take several SATA ports to equal the speed of one NVME drive.

[Monk]

Id take the cheapest option and only use it gir mass storage, move any games you want to play onto a ssd, hdd's just aren't good enough gir most modern games any longer.

[Talby]

Have not had an hdd in a game rig for a while, and working on converting my craptop's abysmal hdd to a sata ssd (currently a 128g nvme w/ 1tb slow hdd)

The old hdds are great on Linux for backups on old rigs, dedicated game server or whatever - just added a 3x2Tb raid5 for a 4tb share last night for backups mainly. I also need to get a large 10g ot 14gb to backup the whole environment, so in the same boat in that respect

[pasa]

100 bucks for little extra cache is clear blatant ripoff.

Gaming-wise, if you plan a hdd, you're also supposed to have a ssd. Where the media speed is interesting you want that game on the ssd instead of whatever cache hdd. And the majority, where it's not significant at all, can sit on hdd. steam offers very simple moving the stuff around after installation.

The amount of cache is most interesting when you issue plenty of writes.

So, you have say a 1T ssd for the system and document files and the few random games. For the rest of the bulk you don't need even the black version. You can be smarter than the fanatics that are happy to spend your money for no practical gain.

[Bad Aim]

Publicado originalmente por pasa:

100 bucks for little extra cache is clear blatant ripoff.

Gaming-wise, if you plan a hdd, you're also supposed to have a ssd. Where the media speed is interesting you want that game on the ssd instead of whatever cache hdd. And the majority, where it's not significant at all, can sit on hdd. steam offers very simple moving the stuff around after installation.

The amount of cache is most interesting when you issue plenty of writes.

So, you have say a 1T ssd for the system and document files and the few random games. For the rest of the bulk you don't need even the black version. You can be smarter than the fanatics that are happy to spend your money for no practical gain.

I actually have 3 NVMe drives. My OS is installed on one of them. I have an NVMe drive specifically for VR games. As a Gen X'er, I tend to play a lot of games that are old. A simple example would be Alice: Madness Returns. Star Wars: Rebellion. Star Wars: Galaxies. And even older games than that. Games like that don't need to be on a NVMe drive. They will work just fine on a HDD.

And like I said, it would be nice to remove some of the HDD's that I currently have installed. That would allow for better air flow though the case and one drive over three would reduce power input.