Does having bigger hard drive or more partitions result in low performance?

[gflores]

I recently got a new 160gb hard drive, upping my total to about 220gb. I was wondering, will my computer be a little slower than before? I have WinXP 2.6ghz, 512 mb ram. Also, I'm going to partition it but I'm not sure how many different partitions I should use. I'm thinking either 3 or 4... will it be faster or slower (or no significant difference) if I have 4 partitians rather than 3? I'm kinda new at this... Thanks!

 

[Hulk]

In general larger hard drives hold more data per platter, or in technical terms have a higher data density then smaller drives so for 1 rotation of the platter more data can be accessed. So, all things being equal, which they rarely are, larger hard drives are faster than smaller ones.

As for partitions, in the past we used to have to partition large drives into many small partitions or else a lot of data would be wasted. With today's file systems this really isn't the case so partition the drive into however many would be optimal for your use.

I don't think it is possible for your computer to have slowed down due to the addition of another hard drive, especially since you didn't replace your boot drive.

It is possible that your bios setting for the new drive isn't correct and the bios is spending too much time looking for the new drive upon start-up. Check the bios and make sure it's set to "auto-detect" for the new drive. Also check the status of the new drive in device manager to make sure everything is okay.

 

[chocoruacal]

Bigger drives are faster. As for partitions...thats for you to decide. I keep a section for the OS and then one big chunk for data...faster that way to move files around.

 

[gflores]

Ok, thanks for the input.

 

[ViRGE]

One thing to keep in mind with multiple partitions is that because each partition is a chunk of the disk, moving files from partitions will be slow, since they need to be read to memory, HD head moved, written down, HD head moved back, read, rinse, lather, and repeat; whereas if the destination is on the same partition as the source, it's simply re-writing the file tables. There's some merit to separating the OS and everything else via partitions to prevent worms and what-not, but that's about it, as you're otherwise fine with a single partition.