A disk drive is disclosed comprising a cache buffer for caching data written to the disk and data read from the disk, the cache buffer comprising a plurality of cache segments linked together to form a plurality of cache links. At least one segment attribute is associated with each cache segment, including an allocation state, and at least one link attribute is associated with the segment attributes within each cache link. When a host command is received from a host computer, the link attributes are evaluated to allocate cache segments for a cache link associated with the host command.