Curious why hard drive cache hasn't increased.

[drdoom]

We are up to 3 and 4 TB hard drives but they still come with 64mb's of cache. That is not any more than when standard hard drives were 80-120 GB. Is it just to lower cost?

[James]

I think you might have some rose colored glasses on there. Most 80-120GB drives were 8MB of cache, or sometimes for a flagship model, they were 16MB. 64MB is actually fairly new as of the last 1-2 years. Even modern drives come with a range of 8MB-64MB on the desktop side of things. Keep in mind most drives still don't have any kind of capacitor system on them, so anything in that cache is gone if you have a power outage.

That being said, enterprise drives have up to 128MB of cache, though 64MB is the standard.