While there isn't a direct WD400JB competitor that I'm aware of, I would rather have only 2MiB of cache than an awful noise.

Incidentally, insofar as the effect of cache size on performance goes, I would be curious to see how the U7 or U9 compares to more mainstream drives. Those were actually 7200RPM drives that had no relation to the previous U Series (U4, U8, U10, U5, U6) - in fact they were identical to the Barracuda ATA V and 7200.7, respectively, except with only 1MiB cache.

I'm not implying that Compaq doesn't care about reliability. I'm talking about performance. The big-name PC manufacturers focus on what sells the most rather than what provides the most benefit. HDD manufacturers keep hyping faster interface speeds way ahead of media transfer rates catching up. Quantum Fireball LCT20 had UDMA 5, but that was pretty pointless considering that it was a 4400RPM drive.

PS. I'm already down to 9.7GB remaining on my ST3120026A.