My laptop came with a 500 GB hard drive. I use my laptop for storing my digital photographs, and only have about 14 GB of file storage left on the original hard drive. I have a 750 GB external hard drive, but am leery of relying on it for primary storage as I tend to knock things over and it has already crashed once and I lost a lot of the files. I am looking at a 1 TB internal hard drive, but am concerned if storing so much data will affect the computer's performance. Should I also increase RAM from 4 to 8 GB (the limit for my 64-bit, Windows 7, Asus A54C laptop)?
Windows – Will a higher hard drive size affect performance
external hard drivehard drivememorypartitioningwindows 7
Best Answer
No, getting a larger hard drive will not impede performance. If anything, it can improve it!
Fifteen or so years ago - when FAT filesystems were being widely used (FAT16, FAT32 etc) - fragmentation was a really big problem (the idea that a block of data on a disk is not always kept in the same place - infact, it could be spread across several different areas on the disk). The fact that a 1GB file could have half of it's data at the start of the disk and half the data at the end of the disk meant that yes - I/O times could be slower as the bigger the disk, the bigger the gap between the blocks and the bigger the space the disk would have to 'seek' to get to it. We don't tend to use FAT filesystems anymore and instead use NTFS or exFAT on modern Windows operating systems, so fragmentation on drives with large amounts of data is not so much of an issue.
This is an interesting read if you are looking for the more in-depth mechanics of how a hard drive operates and what makes a good/bad performer.
In response to whether you should upgrade your RAM from 4GB to 8GB, it definitely would not hurt - if you do any sort of photo editing the extra 'breathing room' would give you a definite speed and performance boost. I'm unsure if your laptop has an 8GB limit or if you're saying Windows 7 has an 8GB limit, but 8GB is not the maximum for Windows 7 and anything above the operating system recommended amount would be advisable.