Larger drive faster reading

Is a larger HDD better in terms of retrieval speed for data? It would seem that in a larger drive XP would be able to distribute data more efficiently for faster reading.

 

A hard drive with faster seek and access times would be faster, but not a larger one. In the market for a new one?

 

I have to add more RAM first. XP pop ups constantly report low virtual memory.

 

I'm probably wrong, but isn't data on any size hard drive written in the same manner, using vacant clusters starting from the front of the drive?

Defragging is still the best way to optimise storage and reading of data. Bazza

PS: the faster the rpm's, of the drive, the better, rather than capacity.
Some drives are around 10,000 rpm nowadays (and the more $$$ they cost) . Baz

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Larger drives are faster if you stick to the first portion of the drive at outer edge of the platter,if you get a 300mb driver and just use a 50gig partition and leave the rest unformatted the drive will be pretty quick due to the amount of data compressed in that portion of the drive ie the head can seek through it all without doing much work,not as fast as the 10000 rpm raptors when full but approaching that,you also have to take into account the platter size of the raptors are an inch smaller than the 3.5 inch standard size which also increases seek time

These are pretty quick

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=314153

 

I set it to System Managed from a preset size. I suppose the "increasing size pop ups" only appear when the VM isn't system managed.

 

So you could use a drive much larger than your requirements and partition only what you need. But what if you need more space? Can you repartition the drive without losing your data?

 

Yes, tools like partition magic will let you make partitions without losing anything. ed

 

True, as far as it goes -- for large files written to sequential clusters on the drive. Most of us have smaller files, and the large ones are often fragmented. In situations like that, a low seek time is the more important variable because the heads are often seeking to the next cluster to read. That's also why defragging can be important -- it rearranges a fragmented file into sequential clusters, reducing the number of times the heads have to seek to a new cluster to read the file.

Rotation speed of the drive helps a little by reducing the time it takes for the next cluster to be read to come round to the head doing the reading. Drive size has little impact here. The advantage of the large drive's outer sectors is that the heads can read more clusters before it has to seek to another track to finish reading the file.

Cache size helps a great deal here, because what's in the cache doesn't have to be read from the drive.

 

Here's a post that describes the issues in somewhat greater detail:

<http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=322&tag=nl.e540>