larger hard drive & speed

[quanttrade99z]

Hello

The Dell salesperson just told me that larger harddrives are slower, and getting a smaller harddrive will speed up my machine.

Is there any truth to this?
Sounds bogus to me...

quanttrade99z

 

[imported_BadBlock]

There is nothing inherent in larger hard drives that would make one slower than a lower capacity drive. Since densities are usually higher on newer generation large hard drives the linear read/write speeds are often a little better than smaller capacity drives. If you look at maximum read speeds on a page like Storage Review some of the drives at the top of the list are also some of the largest drives available.

That said one thing that is slower is the time it takes to do an operation on an entire drive, such as copying an entire drive full of data or doing a wipe operation on an entire drive. While hard drive capacities have increased a lot over the last decade the transfer rates have not kept up, so what used to take minutes now can take hours in that respect.

 

[DSF]

There are some small drives that are faster than some large drives, but as a general trend larger drives are faster. What's funny to me is that he's not only giving you potentially wrong information, but information that could ultimately lose the company a little bit of money. The more you upgrade your PC from the stock setup, the more money Dell makes.

 

[GrumpyMan]

Could he of been talking about a smaller drive with say 1 platter versus a large drive w/3 platters?

 

[imported_BadBlock]

Since it's possible for all the heads to be reading or writing simultaneously to all the platters I don't see a reason why less platters would be faster on average assuming all densities are equal between the theoretical drives.
I think he was just giving quanttrade99z a nice big baloney sandwich 😉

 

[MerlinRML]

It's possible he was talking about SAS drives, which are generally smaller and faster than SATA drives.

The statement provided by the OP (and Dell) is too general, so it becomes useless without context.

 

[T9D]

The larger ones were probably 5400 rpm drives and the smaller ones were 7200 rpm.