Bigger is Not Always Better With Disk Drives?

Question

hard disks

Answer 1

There are multiple things that affect a hard drive...

Size isn't everything (but try telling that to my ex :P )

Obviously size dictates how much data can be stored on a hard drive, but there are other things to consider too...

Spin speed... 5,400rpm??? 7,200rpm??? 10,000rpm??? 15,000rpm??? obviously faster spinning drives generally perform better

Interface... SCSI, SAS, EIDE, SATA??? each works differently... some require spereate controller cards in which case motherboard performance can be an issue too

Head size - each time the hard drive head reads a chunk of data you need to see how much data the drive you want reads... obviously, the more a drive can pick up at once, the better it will perform.

Answer 2

well that certainly depends on your needs for a hard drive. Back before computer hard drives had larger speeds, the larger your hard drive, the longer the seek time was to find data. This was avoided by partitioning the hard drive into smaller chunks, allowing quicker access to the data.

An argument also can be made that if you have a single large hard drive, you've created a single point of failure for all your data. If you have 1 250GB hard drive as opposed to 2 125GB hard drives, then obviously if it dies, you've lost all your data, as opposed to only half if you have the two drives.

Seek times on hard drives lately has improved a lot, negating the necessity of partitioning larger drives into smaller chunks. Some hardcore computer enthusiasts might tell you still that smaller partitions are faster, but if they are, it's by mere milliseconds and practically unnoticeable.

The only other reason you might want to have two smaller drives is if you need to have something called a scratch disk, which usually is used when you're doing large picture editing, or video editing. This allows you to not be reading and writing to the same drive at the same time. This can slow down the progress of your render. By reading from one drive and writing to the other, your hard drive will not be the bottleneck, instead your computer's CPU and RAM are (which are significantly faster than your hard drive).

If you're not planning on doing any serious video editing, or picture editing (im talking really large file size pictures), then bigger IS probably going to be better as you usually get a better cost per gigabyte.

Answer 3

If you are on limited budget then maybe.

If data transfer speed is important to you then it might be better to get a smaller drive that has a faster transfer rate or quicker access time, compared to a bigger but slower drive for the same price.


Other than that, there are some issues at various cut off sizes: 2 GB, 30 GB, 64 GB . . . Most can be overcome with BIOS or software upgrades.

Answer 4

Actually as a general rule bigger is better.

The whole point of a hard drive is to store data and programs for your computer. The bigger your drive (in terms of gigabytes) the more data it can hold, and therefore the better it is.

There are other factors to a hard drive, such as drive speeds and such, but they are secondary to storage space.

Answer 5

correct.
larger drives take more time and resources for the operating system to locate the data you are asking for.
Windows has to search larger areas, and process more data.
you need to defragment more often to make sure the drive is optimized.
and of course it takes longer to do because the drive is larger. It's better to partition the drive into smaller sections, or use several smaller drives if speed is an issue.

Answer 6

Nope. Manufacturer, seek time, access time, how fast it spins, amount of cache, etc., I think are more important figures to be looking at in figuring out which hard drive to buy. A big hard drive is nice, but if it's slow and/or unreliable, what's the point?

Answer 7

Not always!
The more disc surface there is to scan for a file, the (slightly) longer it will take.
Depends on your storage needs, but 2 smaller discs are likely to be quicker than 1 larger disc.
The difference is minimal though...laboratory stuff!

Answer 8

Depends on what your planning on doing with your computer. My advice get about a 60G for your main harddrive in your computer, and then if your doing lots of work with videos, or lots and lots of music production, anything that takes up lots of space. I would get an external 300G harddrive and store all that there...the problem with having a 300G harddrive as your main drive, if you ever get a virus, prepare to wait 8 hrs while it scans everything in your comp. with an external drive, you can unplug it while its not in use, and just plug it in whenever you need to store something on it. That way you dont have to worry about losing information if you have a system crash, or worry about getting a virus embedded to your files.

Answer 9

why not you can always partition them