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What is the primary advantage of an 8 meg buffer over a 2 meg buffer and is there a noticeable performance impact especially for demanding apps like FS??  Also, what is the differances of interfaces as in ata 100, 133, 150 etc.?  Will I need to check and see what my Mobo requires there?  Thanks.

An 8 mb cache is much better then a 2mb cache.

BTW, fs2004 is not a demanding app in terms of hd performence. A 2 mb cache is fine and you won't feel a noticiable difference with an 8 mb cache.

However, if you do other stuff like video encoding or some thing along that line, 8 mb could potenially make a huge difference. Any task that writes and reads from the HD very very frequently performs better with a higher cache. fs2004 simply loads textures and that about it; It does not write to the hd very frequently.

The different ATA numbers are all compatible. The higher the number, the better. However, if your mobo does not support such a high number (like 150), the hd will run the highest number supported (say 133), so that means your hd will essentailly be a ATA 133 drive.

Thank you for the info.

Thats correct.

The opteron is a server class CPU. BTw, the opteron's outperform an equivalent xeons in all benchmarks.

Well the ATA *** represents data rate ATA133 is 133 MB/s ATA150 is 150 MB/s

However, if you do other stuff like video encoding or some thing along that line, 8 mb could potenially make a huge difference. Any task that writes and reads from the HD very very frequently performs better with a higher cache.

So along those lines, in your opinion, would I expect to get better capturing rates from FRAPS using a Maxtor 200GB 7200RPM 16MB? I just hate the avi format they use since it is such a large format.

Yes, but not by much.