I've been considering buying a large hard drive for storing music files. I'd like to put all of my CDs on a hard drive so I can run a cable from my sound card to my stereo (maybe one day buy a DAR, when I can afford it) and play them from the PC rather than the CD player.

At any rate, I noticed CompUSA is having a sale on a Maxtor 120GB 7200RPM drive. The buffer size is 2MB. I've seen other large capacity drives with bigger buffers. I'm wondering how much a factor this should be and what affect it might have on performance.

I suspect it should be fine, as the 20GB Maxtor I have right now certainly doesn't have a cache larger than 2MB. For all I know it's smaller.

I don't plan on running an OS or any programs from it. It would be strictly for storage of music files. Any thoughts?

Thanks