Are smaller drives faster?

Roll

Roll

Roll

Soldato
Joined
20 Apr 2004
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I remember a while back a mate told me that smaller sized drives usually have better seek times and data transfer rates than the larger ones.

Eg. an 80GB drive is faster than a 120GB, 120GB is faster than 160GB and so on.

Just wondered if anyone could confirm if this is right?

Thanks :)
 
Roll said:
I remember a while back a mate told me that smaller sized drives usually have better seek times and data transfer rates than the larger ones.

Eg. an 80GB drive is faster than a 120GB, 120GB is faster than 160GB and so on.

Just wondered if anyone could confirm if this is right?

Thanks :)
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I doubt that GB size has anything to do with speed to be honest, if ti does it would be minute and not noticable at all.
 
Not as such, modern drives are made of platters, the more platters the more capacity. The platters are stacked on top of each other and spin at the same speed so data transfer is the same regardless of capacity I think.

Seek times are to do with the spin speed of the drive.

Jokester
 
Thanks for replies.

I was considering getting a couple of 80GB drives to run in RAID 0 but I don't think I'll bother now.

I know that for the best performance the answer is Western Digital Raptors, but they're so expensive for the amount of storage you get :(
 
i thought with larger drives the cylinders / platters etc were placed closer together to cope with the extra space and as a result the heads didnt have to move as far resulting in better speeds?
 
binaryknight said:
i thought with larger drives the cylinders / platters etc were placed closer together to cope with the extra space and as a result the heads didnt have to move as far resulting in better speeds?
Click to expand...

Don't think so, I think what happens is that a company produces say a 100GB platter. Because the data is packed more densely than say the previous 80GB version you get better sustained transfer rates as for every rotation (at a fixed speed) the head passes over more data. To make a 200GB model they stack 2 platters on top of each other, each with it's own set of heads so there is no specific benefit in having more platters. Then the average seek times are just a function of the RPM and the performance of the head mechanism (which is fixed regardless of capacity).

Jokester
 
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