Seagate 320GB vs. 500GB

[PC_User]

I was just wondering, which is faster and better overall - the Seagate 320gb or Seagate 500gb? I looked on Tom's Hardware charts and could not understand why the 500GB was slower.

I am trying to decide which hdd to use as my primary os drive. I have both sitting on my table and just need to put on in. Both are 16mb cache and SATA. I can only use one and cannot use the other as storage so please help me pick one.

 

[f1y]

if both are the same drives, just different size. The 320GB would be faster because of less surface area to sift through while looking for data.

 

[sethk]

"Less surface area"? Just not true. Thats not how they reduce capacity. It's either done by reducing the number of platters, or by using single sided platters or by reducing track density. Never by reducing used surface area in a way that makes the drive faster.

In most cases the higher capacity drives are the same speed or faster, very rarely are they slower.

 

[Dangman]

I am trying to decide which hdd to use as my primary os drive. I have both sitting on my table and just need to put on in. Both are 16mb cache and SATA. I can only use one and cannot use the other as storage so please help me pick one.

Why can you not use the other as a storage drive?

Anyway, the performance difference is very minimal so I say go for the 500GB since you can't use the other hard drive as storage.

 

[E4g1e]

"Less surface area"? Just not true. Thats not how they reduce capacity.<snip>Never by reducing used surface area in a way that makes the drive faster.

In the past, hard drive manufacturers have been guilty of this. Some brands actually reduced the surface area on some of their hard drives (by using only the inner portion of the platters, leaving the outermost portion unused) in order to reduce the average seek and access times. This might result in faster seek performance but lower maximum sequential transfer rates. Most recently, this happened in the case of 250GB and 320GB drives in the very same line, where the 250GB drives used the same areal density as their 320GB siblings but left the outermost sectors unused.