Any difference in speed 2.5" vs 3.5" at same rpm when used as a secondary HDD?

[BSim500]

As title says, is there any noticeable difference in speed between a 2.5" vs 3.5" drive (both at same 5,400-5,900rpm speed) when used as a secondary drive (downloads, videos, etc) to an SSD? I know sequential is going to be higher on 1TB platters vs 500GB platters, but what about random access / putting web cache on it / WinRAR / the general "feel", etc?

 

[mikeymikec]

When I tested a WD Black versus a WD Scorpio Black (3.5" versus 2.5", both 7200rpm), the former could do about double the throughput of the latter for higher-end transfers (used ATTO for benchmarking), and about three times the performance for low-end transfers (ATTO again).

As a secondary drive though, the only time that I'd care about the transfer speed is when I'm doing drive-to-drive transfers. If I double-click on a JPEG stored on my secondary disk (WD Black 1TB), it's not going to "feel" any faster than compared to the same photo stored on my SSD, the two are going to be pretty much instant.

Comparing my PC's performance to how it was before I put in the boot SSD, I think the only time I might have noticed a difference in browsing performance might have been if a particular website had to do a lot of disk cache reading, or if I chose to load 35 tabs at once. Maybe.

Personally I wouldn't bother setting the web disk cache to a secondary disk, it's more faff for (IMO) no noticeable return.

 

[Flapdrol1337]

They'll both be slow, but if it's just downloads and video who cares?