What does buffer memory mean on an external hardrive?

Question

I am looking to buy an external hard drive and I am noticing some are cheaper for the same size hard drive but have 8mb buffer memory instead of 16, what difference does this make

Answer 1

Think of it as like pre-storage to read and write from before it goes to disk. The larger the cache, the faster the access times. I do believe that the performance difference is minimal. Of course it just depends on the price point. If its only a few dollars more for 16MB then go with that model.