Can you access data quicker on smaller drives

No, in general bigger drives are faster. Sometimes the super capacity drives 500gig etc are a tiny bit slower, but all in all bigger=faster if everything else is equal.

Main reason for this, if you use 40gig on a 320gig hard drive, most of the data will be on the outside edge of the disk, this is where the read/write performance is best.

Secondly if your only using a small percentage of the disk, if you keep it defragmented, and compacted, then the average seek times will be a lot lower, as the disk will just be twitching between the various outer tracks. On a smaller disk that was nearly full, it may be making frequent full seeks, from the edge, to the middle, and back all over the place.

Even if you dont need the space, a 'mid range' disk is normally much better value, and will give you more performance than a nearly full small drive.
 
danoliver1 said:
So to answer your question a smaller drive would be just as fast a bigger drive,
it just would have less platters ;)
Click to expand...
Maybe, maybe not. All large drives use 100GB+ platters say (on the whole, let's not be pedantic about this). This compared with a smaller disk of 40GB platters - even though there is only one, the larger drive will be faster. Not only this but data is more compact per square unit as the disk platters are the same size but larger ones will have more capacity. This means that there is more data per square millimetre say, than a lower capacity drive.

Larger is better for all intents and purposes. Less head strokes, higher data density = faster seeks, faster reads, faster writes.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom