Small hdd = faster boot and more performance?

[crazychicken]

i ordered a WD 60gb 5400rpm for my storage drive, and i heard that a smaller drive is better to boot from and run your system on. is this true? if so, what should i get?

lmk
david

 

[CQuinn]

I would not consider that true, unless you are talking about a smaller partition on
that drive to boot from. Partitioning a drive means that the read/write heads do not have
to seek all the way across the platters to find data during boot up.

In general, a smaller drive means an older drive, and most modern drives will beat out an
older drive because they apply newer technologies to make the drives faster overall.
(There are some rare exceptions,

One other exception: A faster drive (7200rpm) should be able to provide better service even if it
is smaller. But even the 7200s start to show their age after a couple of generations.

 

[JohnnyPC]

I wonder this also in termsof what I believe to be called areal density. If two otherwise similar hard drives each have three platters on which to store their data and one is a 20 gig while the other is a 60 gig, seems to me that the data thats placed on the larger drive would be packed in there a bit more tightly to have the capacity of the drive increased. So if in one revolution of the platter under the drive head, wouldn't more data have the opportunity to be picked up off the platter and in turn put into use quicker than what would happen in the same revolution in the smaller drive? The smaller drive would have fewer bit and bytes flying under the read head per revolution...

 

[ssanches]

<< I wonder this also in termsof what I believe to be called areal density. If two otherwise similar hard drives each have three platters on which to store their data and one is a 20 gig while the other is a 60 gig, seems to me that the data thats placed on the larger drive would be packed in there a bit more tightly to have the capacity of the drive increased. So if in one revolution of the platter under the drive head, wouldn't more data have the opportunity to be picked up off the platter and in turn put into use quicker than what would happen in the same revolution in the smaller drive? The smaller drive would have fewer bit and bytes flying under the read head per revolution... >>



In theory, areal density should improve performance. For instance the Barracuda IV can store 40GB per platter (higher than any other drive currently), but currently, it's not the fastest HDD on the block.

What you need to do is locate the OS on the partition that's at the beginning of the HDD (outermost partition) to get best boot times

 

[RSMemphis]

The Barracuda is hit badly by seek times, a concession to the quietness of the drive.

That's why it does fairly good with large files, but badly with small files.

Areal density and RPM are the most important things, and the beginning of a hard disk has a higher transversal velocity, since the angular velocity is constant.

HD with high angular density, partitioned into like 3 GB for the system and the rest for data is a good idea.