nothingx

It really depends on how you use your machine. Basically, what happens is this... in relative computer times, it takes absolutely forever for your harddrive heads to go out and seek data. So, what the manufacturers have done is implemented a caching mechanism that guesses what data your computer is going to ask for next, and stores it in high speed RAM. If the caching algorithm was correct, your data gets served up much faster than had it gone out and seek'ed the data. Since analogies are so popular in this thread , it would be the same idea as memorizing a phone number instead of having to look it up in the phone book every time you need to make a call.

Now, is 8MB really better than 2MB? Yes, you see, with an 8MB cache, theoretically there is a 4x better chance that the drive will have cached the data your computer will ask for next, and thus, speed things up 4x. Heh, it doesn't actually work that way though... and you will realistically get only a fraction of that many more cache hits.

So, is it faster... yes. Will you actually notice the difference ... probably not. At least, you won't notice the cache size nearly as much as you would a difference in RPMs.