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#50
Hi there
In Europe these can be had for around 125 - 140 EUR so the price is about the same.
What you MUST have to get any sort of decent performance out of these large spinners is A LARGE CACHE otherwise the system will forever be calculating the area / sectors of the disk to acces, wait for the drive to position to the correct physical address and then retrieve the data.
The SATA speed of course becomes important ONCE THE DATA HAS BEEN READ as it's then handled by the computer bus rather than the disk's hardware. Having a large cache means that disk accesses are much less as the data is already in storage, and with a decent "pre-fetching" algorithm the disk controller can read the next bunch of data that it thinks the user will want while the computer is doing something else.
So my advice to anybody thinking of investing in large capacity spinners is ALWAYS to pick the one with the largest Cache as well as having a decent spin rate - typically 7200 rpm or faster.
Cheers
jimbo