Mechanical Hard Drive Cache?

[Iver Hicarte]

Whenever I shop for mechanical hard drives, I always see the "cache" in the system specs, so what is that cache thingy, what does it do?

THANKS IN ADVANCE!!!

 

[SuperSoph_WD]

Hey there, @Iver Hicarte!

This disk cache/cache buffer in the specs is the embedded memory in a hard disk drive (HDD) acting as a buffer between the rest of the computer and the physical hard disk platter that is used for storage. The bigger the HDD cache the more it improves the performance in real time to allocate and optimize cache between reads and writes. You can go through the detailed wiki article here, if you are interested to know more about it.

Hope I was helpful.
Cheers,
SuperSoph_WD

 

[R_1]

quite simply it is a fixed amount of high speed ram built into the drive used for hot data. data that is being written to the drive or read from it.
the higher the cache the faster certain tasks can be performed.
a drive with a 64Mb cache can save files up to that size very quickly without having to wait for the mechanicals to spin up. when the drive does spin up it is written to the platters and the cache memory is flushed for the next task

 

[Iver Hicarte]

Hey there, @Iver Hicarte!

This disk cache/cache buffer in the specs is the embedded memory in a hard disk drive (HDD) acting as a buffer between the rest of the computer and the physical hard disk platter that is used for storage. The bigger the HDD cache the more it improves the performance in real time to allocate and optimize cache between reads and writes. You can go through the detailed wiki article here, if you are interested to know more about it.

Hope I was helpful.
Cheers,

SuperSoph_WD

Wow! What a very detailed answer! Thanks very very informative learned a lot of things in your paragraph! Hahaha!