How is the faster hard drive slower?

I have an older VAIO laptop (PCG-K33). It was infuriatingly slow. One day someone I let use it unplugged the cord to turn it off (The battery is completely dead) and wonder of wonders, it gave me a missing file error and wouldn't boot up.

A good friend gave me one of his laptop HDDs, 2x the capacity.

The computer boots up almost 3 times as fast, apps load 2 times as fast or more, and it is like I have a brand new computer. I was really curious, expecting to find that the old HDD would have a 200RPM, 15second seek time, and a 2 kilobit buffer, but surprisingly, its specifications are actually better than the new, faster HDD!

How can this be??

New HDD:

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Formatted Capacity
Rotational Speed
Avg. Rotational Latency
Spin-up Time
Buffer
Seek Time (Average)
Internal Transfer Rate
Host Transfer Rate

Capacity: 120.034GB
Rotational speed: 4200rpm
Average rotational Latency: 7.14/ms
Spin up time: 4sec (typical)
Buffer: 8MB
Seek time (Average): 12
Internal transfer rate: 183.6 ~ 383.2 Mbits/sec (max)
Host transfer rate: 100Mbytes/sec


Old HDD:

Data buffer (MB) 8
Rotational speed (rpm) 4,200
Latency (average ms) 4.2
Max. media transfer rate (Mbits/sec) 518
Max. interface transfer rate (MB/sec) 100MB/sec Ultra DMA mode-5
16.6MB/sec PIO mode-4
Seek time (ms) Average (typical) - 10
Track to track (typical) - 1.0
Full stroke (typical) - 18

Hitachi DK23FA-60 2.5" 60GB ATA-6 9.5mm 4200RPM Notebook Hard Drive (DK23FA60)<BR>


Please, can someone help me to understand this?

 

I should say that I did a complete hard drive mirror, after scandisk fixed the old HDD.

 

Are you saying that faster hard driver is slower by reading the specs?

 

I am saying that the older hdd with faster specifications was 3x slower to load the o/s and applications than the newer hdd with slower access time etc.

 

The older hard drive could have been fragmented, making the drive take longer to search for parts of files that it needed. Also, where it is older, it might have had some bad sectors on the drive or unreadable areas slowing it down. I think too that specifications given by manufacturer's are estimates and averages, but any given drive might be faster or slower. Its just like how a manufacturer has no real way of knowing how long a drive will last. They have estimates but can't be 100% accurate.