Larger capacity of HDD means it is slow?

Question

1Tb HDD is slower than 500GB if the other parameters are equal? Actually what parameters define the speed of HDDs?

Answer 1

Simple answer: Rotational speed (RPM) of the drive has a lot to do with it.

Detailed Answer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive_performance_characteristics

Answer 2

The size parameter is not the determining performance factor unless almost all other factors are equal.

The "speed" depends on how you define it. There are several distinct "speed" parameters at the hardware level such as seek time, data transfer rate on read, on write. On the software level, the "speed" can be influenced by the partition size, type of file system, and depending on the file system type, fragmentation. Larger file systems will usually have longer mount times and can take longer to do garbage collection.

Performance can be heavily influenced by disk design factors such as media density and cache size. (That is, the physical cache inside the disk itself, not the operating system buffer cache.) A huge disk with huge partitions and file systems can give the appearance of good performance even at a low density if it has a lot of high-speed cache and the disk is used in a normal way, i.e. with a high locality of access.

In general, newer disks have higher densities and larger caches, which more than compensate for any loss of performance that larger size might cause. So I would say that the date of manufacture is more of a determining factor that raw size.

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