Anyone here have any experience with them?Thinking of buying one, wondering how the speed was compared to a 2 or 4mb cache hd

I was just in circuit city today... and I noticed on some Western Digital HD's they had a "Special: 8mb cache!" sticker... what is that for?

Guys, go for it! I purchased the WD 80Gb HD with the 8mb cache. The thing I noticed was the immediate lessoning of stutters and garbling from the ATC I would sometimes get with my older 2mb cache HD. In general what it does is it speeds the rate at which information comes off of the HD to the system memory and ultimately to the CPU. I would strongly recommend it!Robb

I have a WD800JB (80GB with 8MB Cache)Sure, it's quick, but I don't know if it really makes much difference for MSFS.They also come with a 3 year warrenty, so it's worth paying a little more for one to have that peice of mind :)

I have a Maxtor 6Y080L0 8 MB Cache, 80 GB and 7200 RPM, on my system, it seemed like perforamnce doubled with windows and other stuff going from older IBM 13.6 GB 7200 RPM HD which was noisy and my Maxtor I can barely hear!

Get it its good just a few dollers more just keep looking for good price's hardware is cheap now good luck.

What I found was that in situations where there were mulitple things going on like having an airplane in complex scenery and then ATC would call and that would seem too much for the system with the old HD. That is, I would get pauses and stutters (very momentarily but definitely noticeable) when ATC would call in. My interpretation was that the system would going into a slight overload. The 8mb cache HD seemed to help this by allowing information to come from the HD more quickly and thus more smoothly... It stopped the stutters... That was my experience.Robb

Circuit City this week (starting Sunday 03-02-03) has the Western Digital 80 gig HDD special edition for 69.99 (139.99 - $70.00 mail in rebates). Tough to beat that deal. Less than a buck a gig, and it has the 8mb cache to boot.Tim13

While a disk like this has blazing speed, I have no idea what it could possibly do to improve your flightsim experience, except load the sim faster.Guys, pleeze your are playing the game with memory and a graphics card not with the HD. Alex

I bought a maxtor 120GB HD for my new pc with an 8MB Cache, i think it should keep data following alittle better. You guys just missed a really good deal from maxtor and best buy (ended 3/1/03) buy a maxtor 120GB HD for $149.99, then knock of $10/best but mail-in rebate and then another $40 from maxtor equaling out to a final cost of $100 .....the best deal (if you don't mind mail in rebates) I found anywhere.

>While a disk like this has blazing speed, I have no idea >what it could possibly do to improve your flightsim >experience, except load the sim faster. >>Guys, pleeze your are playing the game with memory and a >graphics card not with the HD. >>Alex Actually... This is not the case. For this to be true, the entire sim would have to be loaded into system memory (including textures for the ENTIRE WORLD, ATC, AI, physics engine, etc.). So your HD is a factor. The idea is that FS should load any info it needs off the HD into system memory before the info is actually needed, so your HD isn't constantly being accessed. In very complex scenes sometimes the proper info isn't in system memory so the info has to be retrieved from the HD and this leads to the stuttering some people get in these situations. Your computer has a multi-tiered memory system which goes something like this: CPU L1 Cache->CPU L2 Cache->System Memory->HD cache->HD. When a program calls for certain data the first thing your computer is going to do is look in the CPU's L1 Cache. If the info is not there it will progress onto the L2 Cache, then the system memory, then the HD's cache, then the HD itself. It takes a lot of CPU power to go through all those steps so the bigger and faster your caches, the quicker your system can get the info it needs. You see, any type of RAM (which is what all these caches are made of) is faster than your big, slow HD. So a faster HD with a bigger cache can definitely help alleviate these situations (or even prevent them altogether). The ideal computer wouldn't even have system memory or an HD, it would just have huge CPU caches using non-volatile memory (memory that doesn't lose it's info when power is turned off, like current CPU caches and system memory do).hope this helps

The only downside to the WD model on sale at CIrcuit City this week is that it is only ATA 100 :(The one at CompUSA is 80gb as well (7200rpm) and is ATA 133.....also, it is 69.99 (the same price as the one at the Circuit City sale, lol).;)Shane

LOL,Max, of course I am aware of what you write here and it is all true... theoretically. But from a practical standpoint the HD is really the very, very last in the chain of command here. Especially if you have enough memory. After all nobody has a 3200 rpm HDD anymore. If u are looking to increase the performance of FS2k2 I would suggest that u upgrade the graphics card, the processor, the memory or the mobo (in that order but depending on ur current setup).However if u have an nForce chipset, a Radeon 9700, 1024MB of Corsair low latency memory and a Barton XP 3000+ go ahead and buy the 8MB cache HDD (or save ur money wait a month and start over at the beginning :-)).Alex

I recently got a western digital 80gig with 8mb cache..nothing changed in fs

>The only downside to the WD model on sale at CIrcuit City >this week is that it is only ATA 100 :( LMAO! "only" ATA100 hehe, that's a good one. The difference between ATA100 and ATA133 in the real world is slim to none. ATA133 is good for maybe another mb or two in throughput if anything at all...