Western digital HD 8 M cache

[cboy]

Hello. I've just bought a new WD HD 80G with 8M cache, installed it as a second drive and I was wondering if it's normal to hear the heads every 5 sec? I've test it and the speed and response is the same as my old 40G WD. So why would I need one more expensive (yes, with 8M cache) if a simple one would the same job?

[cboy]

and do you know a good defragmenter, cause windows disk defrag sucks.

[rambler]

Depends on what you used to test it. I installed a Maxtor 120Gb 8Mb 7200rpm drive last year, and instantly could SEE the speed improvement. Two tests - Norton Sysinfo and Scisoft Sandra reported similar results - over twice as fast in data transfer, much faster access times. Could be your PC is some years old, and your IDE channels are limiting data transfer, so you don't see much or any difference.

I use Norton SpeedDisk, it's fast, intelligent, you can tell it where to put individual critical files like pagefile, to move little-used files to centre of disk etc., and it keeps an image of system areas like FATs and folders to assist Norton Disk Doctor to recover HD contents in the event of a serious problem.

Forget what you read about Norton stuff being error-prone, over-blown etc. you don't NEED to use or even install those progs at all. It's worth getting N.Utilities just for SpeedDisk and Disk Doctor - still excellent products.

[Dexter]

actually the windows defragger works just fine.  for some reason when you run it via the GUI it's terrible and only defrags the files but doesn't rearange the free space.

If you run defrag from the command line it actually does a very good job and will move everything to the begining of the HD.

[A+Net+MCP]

I have a WDJB800 also but I don't hear noises much just a click every now and then don't I don't now for sure if it's my HD. I haven't tried speed testing it. The 8MB cache drive should be 30% faster I read.