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To: jim kelley who wrote (49088)	8/6/2000 8:30:41 PM
From: Dan3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

Re: whu don't we just take that nasty expensive cache's out of those disk drives... The 256K to 2 meg of buffer can be embedded into the controller and is nearly free. Having a buffer on the drive allows it to read data a sector at a time, even if only a few bytes are requested. The read is buffered not because it is too fast but because it is too slow. You don't want to interrupt the bus for every byte transferred at a data rate of 5 or 10MB/sec (most drives are not state of the art that was announced last week). That rate is fast enough to slow things down with interruptions but way too slow to efficiently stream data directly. So the reads are buffered and the data is sent in blocks to the controller. There isn't an expensive cache on the drive, if it were a major determinant of drive performance, there would be. Where cache is helpful is on the controller, which is beyond the ATA interface. Dan