HDD / OS question

J

JamesBart

New Member
Can the size of a Hdd affect the performance of a OS.

So say im running a 20gb hdd with XP SP2...

and a 160gb Hdd with the same OS...

and im saving to an external Hdd could there be any performance issues or any differences at all?

do you know what i mean? and also both Hdd's are 7200rpm.

Thanks :)
 
the response time of the hard drive, the buffer memory, and the interface. if theyre the same everyting should be the same
 
oscaryu1 said:
yeah, as long as the things i specified above are the same it dont matter, its just more platters in the HDD.
Click to expand...

cool. i think i read somewhere that the bigger the hardrive say t was 7200rpm it would be better than 160gb 7200rpm drive.

all in all its good! :D
 
A newer larger and "faster" hard drive is what will make a difference. If you are running a 5,200rpm or even older 13gb 4,200rpm drive and then upgrade to a newer and even larger drive obviously there since capacities have increased in the few short years there you see a performance boost to some degree for the OS except perhaps for Linux or an older version of Windows being stretched by bypassing the bios somehow.

Try taking 98SE seen on an oder 13gb 4,200 ide drive and then seeing it running on a 250gb 7,200rpm model and you will notice something there fast. The different builds here saw 98 upgrade 95 on a 1.4gb drive and then to a 13gb 4,200rpm drive to later see a 40gb drive(same speed) to the eventual 120gb 5,200rpm drive and then dual booted on a 250gb 7,200. Gee? 98 had a llong day there! :P
 
What you were proably seeing was the loadup time of Windows being same since that it is loaded directly into memory. You most likely had the paging file set to none or a small size with only that small amount of drive space left and see Windows running without error messages. I've seen that come up while having as much as 50gb still available due to the size of the files themselves on the drive being the problem. That of course is with cideo files being as large as 13gb in size for one file alone.
 
6071842 said:
Can the size of a Hdd affect the performance of a OS.

So say im running a 20gb hdd with XP SP2...

and a 160gb Hdd with the same OS...

and im saving to an external Hdd could there be any performance issues or any differences at all?

do you know what i mean? and also both Hdd's are 7200rpm.

Thanks :)
Click to expand...


Well, there is a little known trick to increase seek time on your HD by partition schema. Now, basically look at it this way. The OS is designed to search the boot volume for applications and OS features. The larger the volume the more the seek time. So, lets say you have a 250 gig HD in your system. You partition it (assuming you are running windows) into two drives, C:\ which is 50 gigs and D:\ which is 200 gigs. Now, you load your applications and your OS on C:\ and then dump all your data files onto D:\ you will in fact increase your seek time since the OS and the drive itself has to scan less amount of space.

This is also wise because if your OS ever crashes then you can simply wipe out and reinstall C:\ leaving all your data untouched on D:\, though you should always have back ups
 
"Frequent Backups" is a key expression that passes right by many ears tarkin! I think you know that well enough. Somone known here questioned why he should strictly use a new 250gb drive for storing files in order to use the 80gb primary as the OS drive. He wants a second install of the same version of Windows instead of configuring software to save files created to the new drive added to increase storage space there.
 
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