What is Multi Tier Caching on the Seagate Barracuda HDD

[Blake Fasse]

I'm looking into getting a new HDD because mines been making grinding noises and the system has slowed down a lot lately. My question is when I was trying to find the speed of the Seagate Barracuda 4TB drives it didnt say it ran in RPM's but by Multi Tiered Caching and I have no idea what that means.

Here are the links to the Amazon page I found it on and Seagate's website:
https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-BarraCuda-3-5-Inch-Internal-ST4000DM005/dp/B01LNJBA50/ref=sr_1_1?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1485586950&sr=1-1&keywords=ST4000DM005

http://www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/hdd/barracuda/

 

[rkzhao]

There's a "Multi-Tier Caching Technology White Paper" link on the Seagate site for Barracuda that can explain the details.

It's pretty much what it sounds like. Normally, HDDs have DRAM to cache operations for performance. The DRAM can hold data before actually flushing it to the underlying disk.

Multi-Tier caching is just a fancy way to say they use multiple stages to cache the data. For a traditional HDD like, Barracuda, I think there's really only what they call a media cache. This is essentially a reserved section on the disk that will store data without fragmentation to optimize performance since sequential operations are much much faster than randoms for an HDD. So the data first goes to DRAM, then to media cache, then finally gets moved to the final location of the disk.

Oh also, I believe the latest 3.5" Barracuda drives are 5900 RPM. They decided to not publicize the spindle speed much with these latest drives for some reason. Maybe because Barracudas used to be 7200 RPM and they didn't want to have people be turned off by the RPM numbers?

 

[Blake Fasse]

Okay Thanks. I did read that but I didn't really understand it (I guess that's what happens when you stay up till 2 in the morning). All of this aside one thing that I'm not sure if its the HDD's fault is Windows will use almost 75-90% of system RAM on idle and it never did that before. I have 16GB and I only use 2 extensions on Chrome and I don't keep 50 Million browser tabs at once.