I read somewhere that smaller (in terms of disk space) hard drives are faster than equivalent but bigger hard drives. How true is this? In other words, say I have two hard drives. Both are of the exact same brand and specs, but one is an 80GB while the other is 500GB. Which would be faster? Or does storage capacity not have any effect on speed at all?
Does storage capacity affect hard drive performance
hard driveperformance
Best Answer
A generalisation isn't useful, but mostly when talking similar models/same series I'd say the larger drive would be faster due to higher data density in some way (be it more platters and heads, or just denser platters).
The bigger model would likely be newer as well and could benefit from firmware and other production improvements.
This is even more true in the world of SSD where the larger capacity options are generally faster due to more parallelism. On the other hand, sustained throughput isn't always the important factor of an SSD compared to mechanical drives but rather the low-latency on small random access read/write - which will be the same in most scenarios regardless of the number of chips.