PC hardware forum: HdD tech Quiry : will Bigger HdD search slower, will bigger

Just fitted a 300GB 7200 RPM type drive from a common retail store and it was 99 bucks. An 80 on the shelf was 69 bucks. Your choice here but there is some urban rumor that big drives have some early failures. I'll disagree and just write that with bigger drives people tend to lose more when a mistake happens.

Bob

I agree that with the size of disks increasing, people lose more data, and that is influencing their thoughts on bigger drives being unreliable. With a 300gb drive for $99, I say buy 2, an inexpensive RAID1 pci card, and consider yourself better protected than 99% of the population. As someone who has had harddrives crash personally as well as helped people with their crashes, I ask: Is $100 too much to pay for insurance that you won't lose any data if a crash happens?

However, if YOU delete the files or get a virus, the second drive will not help you. This is not a backup, it is an exact copy down to the smallest bit including all viruses. If you want to additionally do backups, that is another choice altogether.

In general, a larger drive is not any slower assuming all other specs are the same. And I have not really found them any less reliable, however it is difficult to determine because as hard drives have gotten larger, computers in general are accessing the drives more than ever and people are working the drives harder with streaming music, video and constant nightly virus and spyware scans. So in general the failure rate has gone up due to use.

As long as you are comparing appples to apples. Same RPM and same size cache you should be all set. However, avoid some specific drives that I have found to be unreliable such as the Maxtor ATA133 80 and 100 gig drives.

If 80 gig is all you need and you really want to increase performance you might find a good deal on the Western Digital Raptor 74 gig drives. These 10,000 rpm drives are really fast.

Good luck

More speed than I got is not my point right now, I just didn't want get somethin that would slow me down. I am retired, just sorta play at computer, I do not game. Yes, I considered Raptor for a while, decided not worth the premium price to me. Since my first post, have already bought 200 gig Seagate. I will post more at bottom of page, Thank you for gettin in conversation. Ol Rod

That's quite a high failure rate. We have installed about thirty of these drive within the last two years and had only one failure. I'd be curious as to which hard drive manufacturer is providing the SATA drives ie. Maxtor, Seagate, etc.

1) Bigger drives often pack more info per square inch. The closer the info is packed, the less distance the HD heads have to travel to read / write data. This often makes bigger drives faster.

2) Bigger drives may be a newer "generation" of drives, which means performance improvements in the new generation are built in.

Caveat: A bigger drive may be bigger because of multiple platters rather than higher density. In such a case, bigger won't mean faster.

Regarding reliability: Some say the very newest (and highest density) drives are a little less reliable since the bugs aren't worked out. But I've never seen hard data that proves this is true.

As a rule of thumb, buy the most gigabytes your budget will allow. You won't regret having "too much space" in a year or two.

Thank you all for gettin back to me. I read every post carefully. Right after R. Proffitt's first reply, I went ahead and ordered a 200 gig Seagate barracuda ST3200826AS from NewEgg. Little brown truck delivered it today, I waited for the delivery to post back. I chose that one because they had free shipping on it. Also, this is the last of an older line that they call SATA 150 , The newest line does something they call "perpendicular" recording. I was thinking along with the poster that said sometimes the first of the new may not be as dependable as the last of the old. Now, I got a new Hd and new OS to play with and gotta go. Thanks, All !! Ol Rod

If you are looking for better disk performance, pay attention to the spindle speed as much as anything else. Disks that turn 10,000 rpm are faster (about 2x) than 7,200 rpm drives. Yes, they do cost more but if you want a faster disk drive, the metric to pay attention to is not size. It is spindle speed.

RAID 1 across 4 drives is the fastest typical PC disk configuration. It is substantially faster than a single disk and noticeably faster than a pair.