Hard drive cache question

hey folks... my ADK machine has two secondary drives, both Seagate 300gig SATA drives. I've decided to upgrade those to 2 new Seagate 500gig SATA drives. One of the new drives has 16MB cache, the other has 32MB cache.

My D drive currently is my audio drive, my E drive is my loops/samples drive.
Question: what makes sense as far as where the new 32MB cache drive should be (audio or loops/samples)???

rusty

ORIGINAL: Steve_Karl

At this point in time I don't think it will matter. CPU will still be the bottle neck for streaming anything.
Any new hard drive is fast enough to do more than your CPU can handle.

The CPU will only bottleneck if there is a large amount of processing going on. If you are just moving files around, the CPU is orders of magnitude faster than the hard drive, and in some cases, using DMA for transfers from memory, the CPU is minimally involved. Your conclusion that it probably will not matter much which drive is used for which files may well be correct. In most cases the data will not be delivered at a rate fast enough to exceed either of these buffers. But CPU's run circles around hard drives in terms of data transfer, and the hard drive is almost invariably the slowest link in data transfers. In general if you anticipate a lot of relatively small (smaller than the drive cache) data transfers to the hard drive, the bigger cache will serve better. This is because the cache (solid state memory) built into the drive can accept data much faster than the drive can read or write it to the platters. If you exceed the cache capacity, you will need to wait for the physical write to catch up.