If i upgrade my harddrive, will it help speed up my computer ?

Question

I would like to increase the size of my harddrive, will my computer run at a quicker pace ? Thanks

Answer 1

I'm afraid some of those answers are incorrect - I do this for a living... believe me, hard drive performance makes a huge difference. I also do the same thing in my home computers.

The best thing you can do actually is not REPLACE your hard drive but add a SECOND hard drive. Use your old 2nd drive to put personal files on, your browser cache, etc. You'd be amazed at what a difference a good fast drive makes. The rage now is 3gb SATAII drives - get at least a 7200rpm drive.

The more hard drive spindles you can divide your work on in a computer, the faster things will run - up to a point. I have 6 internal 500gb SATAII drives in my computer, and 2 External 500GB Firewire drives on it. The internals are setup as a RAID array so that I can record 4 High Def TV stations simultaneously, while I am also serving up to 3 high def streams to people in the house. Believe me, the hard drives make ALL the difference. Without good fast hard drives and lots of them, there's no way I could do this.

BTW, drive technology is changing radically right now. Eventually, manufacturers will combine heat-assisted and patterned media to produce drives that will be capable of storing 50 to 100 terabits of data per square inch. That's 280 to 560 times more dense than the 178.8 gigabit-per-square-inch drive coming from Toshiba later this year. (A square inch of 100-terabit material could hold as much data as 12,500 pickup trucks filled with books.)

Pretty incredible, eh?

Answer 2

Here is a break down for the speed of a computer:

CPU: The faster the Gigahertz, the faster the computations. This works more for Gaming, CAD and other programs that need rendering, uses lots of graphics. It doesn't make a bit of a difference to programs such as Word or other applications that don't have a lot of computations.

Bus: This is most important. The bus is the highway of the computer. The faster the bus can transfer information from the CPU, RAM, devices (including the Hard drive) and back, the faster the computer will be. Again, this will not be noticeable to applications such as Word.

RAM. There are two parts to RAM. Capacity and speed. They are interrelated. The more RAM, the more you can run. The faster the RAM, the faster it can send though the Bus and CPU. There are several different types of RAM. Older machines (but less than 15 to 20 years old) used SD RAM, which is very slow compared to newer RAM. DDR and DDR2 are the newer RAM in the current PC's.DDR is Double Data Rate which allows two-way traffic. Rambus is another type of RAM, but it was shelved due to Legal problems. It is common to have 1 GB of RAM for Windows XP and 2 GB for Vista.

Hard Drives: There are two types of Hard Drives currently; IDE (the older of the two) and Serial ATA (SATA). SATA is much faster than IDE even though SATA is Serial (one lane highway). HDD (hard disk drives) are the usual bottleneck of PC's. They are much slower than the other components mentioned above. Even the SATA is not as fast as the other components. However, you can get a bit more speed out of HDD's (especially IDE). The first requires periodically defragging the Hard Drive. The second is to give DMA access. DMA allows the Hard Drive to access the RAM directly without going through the CPU. In many modern PC's, DMA is automatically activated. But, check to see if yours is on DMA.

To check for DMA, you need to make sure it is "on" in the BIOS and to check the Hard Drive in "Computer and Properties."

As mentioned by the other answers, the faster a HDD can spin (7200 RPM) and the Cache (8 MB currently) aids in speeding the HDD a bit but not where you can see the results. Also, the more RAM you have helps keep your HDD acting as Backup RAM.(called Virtual Memory) which helps keep the PC going a bit faster.

For a Standard PC Running Windows: 98SE works best with 128 MB to 512 MB RAM. If you have ME, get rid of ME and go back to 98 SE or upgrade to XP if your computer can handle XP. Windows 2000 works best with 128 MB RAM or more. Windows XP works best with 512 MB (minimum) and more. Most home computers usually can handle only up to 2 GB of RAM. But, that is changing as technology gets better.

Answer 3

Mark K has some good info.

In my words, your computer has to read and write data to the hard disk. RAM access times are measured in Nano seconds (ns) - hard disk access is measured in Milliseconds (ms) - RAM works 500 to 1000x faster than FAST hard disk. Using a fast hard disk CAN help your performance - when you use a 10,000 RPM drive you can see an improvement over a 5400 RPM drive. If you setup a RAID 0 (or better still a RAID 10) you can see a more noticeable performance increase.

But as many have said, RAM will make the biggest difference.

Answer 4

If your system is older then I would say yes. The newer hard drives are much more efficient than older models and have larger buffers to store more information as they work. Also if your hard drive is getting filled up your system will slow down because it can't make the swap file large enough due to the lack of space. Smaller swap file means slower system. So yes newer larger hard drive means faster computer. Not a huge gain of speed but I'm sure it will be noticeable.

Answer 5

Uh installing a larger hard drive will only increase your storage space. Adding more RAM will speed up your computer. That is the short answer. The answers above are the long version of the answer you are looking for. Read them and understand them.

Answer 6

Western Digital's "Raptor" HDD will improve the speed of your computer. It's a SATA 150, but runs at 10,000 RPM. They come in three sizes, 150GB, 74GB, and 36.7GB. Like the others were saying, it's the speed at which the drive accesses information that speeds things along.

Answer 7

It will increase the speed of your computer - but only slightly. If you can, go with a SATA hard drive. If not, go with at least a 7500 RPM one - with a 8MB cache.
Adding more memory will make a more noticeable change in the speed of your machine. You are going to have it apart - might as well add memory too!!

Answer 8

If you are getting messages for having no disk space, low disk space on your hard disk, while installing a new software, then getting a bigger hard disk will help. Otherwise try to uninstall some unessential programs, from your hard disk. Copy music files, pictures, images, etc onto a cd and delete them from your hard disk to make more space. The computer works better if it has some free space left on the hard disk.

Answer 9

No,

A hard drive is a hardware device that stores data...like your operating system and programs that you use. Upgrading your hard disk drive (HDD) may give some enhanced performance, however not enough to notice a change. Upgrading your hard drive mainly will just give you increased data storage capacity.

If you upgrade and/or increase the RAM that will help you out alot.

Answer 10

it depends if your hard drive is spinning at 7200 RPM it is slower than 10000 RPM. also there is a new type of hard drive that is a hybrid hard drive from samsung working with microsoft so heads up because it is even faster than the 10000 RPM hard drives