How does an old Western Digital HDD (from 2007'ish) compare to today's mechanical HDD's?

[Jamesisaking]

I'm looking to build a very budget, very light gaming rig for a friend and have a new-in-box "Western Digital Cavier SATA II 400gb 7200rpm 8mb" from about 10 years ago.

How would that HDD compare to today's mechanical drives? I notice the 8mb cache is much smaller but everything else seems pretty comparable.

 

[clutchc]

The small cache is the only drawback to the 32MB and 64 MB models today. Otherwise it is fine if you can live with the small size.

 

[Superkoopatrooper]

It'' be a little slower but it should get the job done. I know modern black drives advertise a faster processor within the HDD so I assume the older HDD's have older processors within. It should be 100% fine though for gaming. Just be sure to defrag the drive often.

 

[BFG-9000]

Period reviews of the time showed a sequential transfer rate of about 65MB/s on the outer track decaying to about 40MB/s on the inner track. In other words only up to about twice as fast as what USB 2.0 is capable of. Here's what modern Blue, Black 4TB and Black 6TB drives can do. More than 2x or 3x as fast.

Both old and new drives will appear to stall and struggle with many small files or multiple tasks at once (which is what SSDs excel at) but the old drive will still feel much slower than any new HDD because Microsoft has made many tasks such as Windows load or resume sequential. It'l work fine if you are patient.

BTW the RAM cache is the only thing that actually can transfer at SATA II or III sppeds (300MB/s or 600MB/s). Whether 8MB or 64MB that's pretty small even if one is 8x the size of the other.