What Is the Difference Between a SATA Hard Drive & a Data Burst Cache?

DataBurst Cache is Dell's name for a disk cache on a hard drive.

A computer's hard drive is the component on which all the data is stored, including the operating system, files, music and images. There are two common types of hard drive that computers use – SATA, or Serial Advanced Technology Attachment, and the IDE, or Integrated Drive Electronics. Hard drives have many properties associated with them, primarily their size, which tells you how much data they can hold, but another is the hard drive cache, referred to as the Data Burst Cache in Dell computers.

SATA Hard Drive

SATA hard drives are an advancement on the older IDE models, being faster than the predecessor and having a greater bandwidth. SATA drives use shorter cables and are cheaper to produce, as they use only seven conductors or “pins” on their terminals, as opposed to the 40 used in IDE drives. They also support “hot swapping,” which is where a computer component can be unplugged without having to shut the computer down.

Data Burst Cache

Every hard drive has a disk cache, which is a buffer between the computer and the hard drive. It is used to store certain data so that when the user requests the data again in the future, it can be returned more quickly. “DataBurst Cache” is simply a marketing buzzword used by Dell to refer to the disk cache on Dell computers. Typically, a DataBurst Cache is 8MB, 16MB or 32MB in size.

Differences

The DataBust Cache, or the hard drive cache more generally, is a property of a hard drive, rather than a component in itself. The hard drive is the primary container for all data and is many times larger than the disk cache. A disk cache is a much smaller buffer used to increase the access to data retrieval. All hard drives use a disk cache, and the DataBurst Cache is simply the name that Dell Computers give to the hard drives caches on their own products.

Benefits of the Cache with SATA Drives

Larger disk caches are becoming more common not only because of lowering costs of the technology, but also for performance reasons. SATA drives store commands to access the data in the buffer where programs are able to reorganize these in an optimal way. This means that the hard drive makes the minimum of actual physical movement needed to read the data and send it to the computer's memory. This is called Native Command Queuing, or NCQ.

References

• SATA IO: Benefits of Using SATA
• Webopedia.com: DataBurst Cache
• Tom's Hardware: 8 or 16 MB Buffer