BF2S Forums How does the hard drive cache affect a game?

I know 6MB vs. 12MB does not really make a noticeable difference, but idk about 2MB vs. 8MB.

_j5689_ wrote:

haffeysucks wrote:

I know 6MB vs. 12MB does not really make a noticeable difference, but idk about 2MB vs. 8MB.

I've never heard of a hard drive with 6 or 12MB of cache.  Are you talking about a processor?

Sorry, on second thought, maybe it was 8MB and 16MB.  I don't really remember.  I just remember one was twice the other's amount.

_j5689_ wrote:

haffeysucks wrote:

_j5689_ wrote:

I've never heard of a hard drive with 6 or 12MB of cache.  Are you talking about a processor?

Sorry, on second thought, maybe it was 8MB and 16MB.  I don't really remember.  I just remember one was twice the other's amount.

Well, in any case, what benefits do you think more HDD cache brings to a game?  Faster loading times, more framerates or what?

Possibly faster loading times, but if anything, I think your RAM upgrade would help immensely.  I know when I upgraded from 512 MB of ram to even just 1 GB, shorter BF2:SF loading times were a shock to me.

This is actually the link I looked at before, take a look: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/und … 557-5.html

_j5689_ wrote:

Yeah, my other comp had 2GB of RAM in it but it was DDR1, maybe it'll be way more significant this time now that I have DDR2 RAM.

I had been running on DDR RAM up until yesterday and it was like a bad leg.  I'm actually off now to enjoy/see differences between my old DDR RAM and my new 4GB of DDR2 1066 RAM.

_j5689_ wrote:

haffeysucks wrote:

_j5689_ wrote:

Yeah, my other comp had 2GB of RAM in it but it was DDR1, maybe it'll be way more significant this time now that I have DDR2 RAM.

I had been running on DDR RAM up until yesterday and it was like a bad leg.  I'm actually off now to enjoy/see differences between my old DDR RAM and my new 4GB of DDR2 1066 RAM.

Damn, mine won't be that fast, being that this is an 800MHz FSB on a proprietary board.  Either way, I suppose it should be significant.

800 MHz is really the standard, there's not really that much noticeable difference between it and 1066.

Hard drive cache makes a boatload of difference. I used to have an 80GB drive with 8MBs of cache. Now I have a 250GB one with 16MBs of cache and the difference was obvious. Much, much faster loading times (especially in BF2 with verifying client data). Defragmenting took far less time and just generally doing anything with files was faster.

Edit: and about RAM. What good is more/faster RAM when your hard drive can't give it the information fast enough to begin with?

Last edited by Fat_Swinub (2008-06-07 02:28:45)

De_Jappe wrote:

Doesn't really sound like a "new computer" when you have only 512MB ram and 80G HD (with 2MB cache)?

Anyway, yes there will be a difference, but it won't be that big. More cache usually means faster writing, also read behind/ahead. But there are a lot of other factors, like the speed at which the disk spins.

And the most important factor for improving your game load time will be: RAM

Yeah, it's new compared to the socket 478 machine I had before.  That one was upgraded by me though, hence the reason it has 2GB of RAM and a 160GB HDD.  I got this for free and it's a a generation or two ahead of what I had before (the old one had AGP and DDR1 single channel RAM) so I'm not complaing.

DDR2 RAM is dirt cheap compared to DDR RAM, I would have to pay 100$ to get 2GB of DDR and I don't even really need to pay much more than 40 for the same amount in DDR2.  I LOVE it.

Fat_Swinub wrote:

Hard drive cache makes a boatload of difference. I used to have an 80GB drive with 8MBs of cache. Now I have a 250GB one with 16MBs of cache and the difference was obvious. Much, much faster loading times (especially in BF2 with verifying client data). Defragmenting took far less time and just generally doing anything with files was faster.

Edit: and about RAM. What good is more/faster RAM when your hard drive can't give it the information fast enough to begin with?

Then 2MB to 8MB should also be significant because I believe most games were made for modern systems that have more than 2MB of cache.  Sort of like how substantial it is to upgrade from 512MB of RAM to 1 Gig.  This computer has SATA capability also, but I don't know when I will be able to get a hard drive for that.

LividBovine wrote:

_j5689_ wrote:

Yeah, my other comp had 2GB of RAM in it but it was DDR1, maybe it'll be way more significant this time now that I have DDR2 RAM.

Also depends on if the ddr ram was dual channel or not.  If you were running on an older chipset that didn't support dual channel, you will see a much larger increase in performance.  1 gig (2 x 512mb) in dual channel is kind of like sleeping with twins when 1 gig (2 x 512mb) not in dual channel is kind of like taking home 2 cows from the club.  Just not the same thing is it?

Yeah, the old one was single channel.  Is dual channel that much more significant?