I was just wondering if size influences a Hard Drive's speed. For example, If I have a 20 Gig HD at 7200 rpm and a 80 Gig HD at 7200 rpm, are they both going to be as fast? Or will the smaller drive be faster? Anyways, thanks to you all for your time.
Well it depends on a few things. The bigger the amount of data, the slower it'll be, but you can avoid that by making smaller partitions. Also, if your 80gb is a newer model than your 40gb, all things considered equal, chances are the 80gb will be faster.
Depends on the number of platters. The higher the number of gigabytes per platter, the closer the data bits are to each other, and therefore faster to access. In practical terms, if a platter can hold 20GB per side, it's no slower than if another drive using the same platter has read/write heads for both sides. The main thing that would slow the 2nd drive down is that the heads are controlled by one motor, and can only access one bit at a time through one of the heads. This would slow it down slightly, but you'd never be able to tell. Newer drives have denser platters, and that is where I've noticed the greatest speed increases. This means that a newer hard drive running at only 5400RPM can be just as fast, and sometimes faster, than an older 7200RPM hard drive.
