Silly Harddrive Question?
 

I have two harddrives: a 40 and 160GB. The 40 is my primary drive and the 160 is where I store my music, videos, pictures, etc. Retrieving and looking for things on the 40 is just slightly faster than my 160. My question is this: is my 40 faster because of the smaller size and because it simply doesn't have as much or as many places to look than the 160GB? Is that even a factor? Just wondering. Thanks

no, each hardrive has its own access speed. check the specs to find this speed.

larger hard disks tend to have more heads so they can be as fast or faster, but it all depends on the drive, theres no rule that smaller - faster with drives though or vice versa

track to track seek times, rpms etc all affect speed.

fragmentation can be an issue too, buffer size of the drive itself.

defrag every week and it will keep the speed up.

also drives have difrent rotational speeds, 7200rpg v 5400 rpm usualy. in addition the mechanics inside determin the acces speed.

If you're transferring from one disk to another, you may want to check the Master and Slave settings. If you're transferring to and from the same ide controller, it'll be a bit slower than from one controller to another.

but the speeds of the individual drives may come into play as well.

Assuming the 40gb is the master and the 160gb is the slave (PC terminology isn't very PC!) then that's to be expected, because the slave drive is going to have a higher latency than the master (since it's last in the chain).
As for bigger drives being slower, no I don't think it's really going to be a noticeable change in speed.

Depends on a lot of stuff:
Buffer: 2mb vs. 4mb vs. 8mb
Rotation speed: 5400rpm vs. 7200rpm vs. 10000 rpm
Latency time
% of drive fragmented
Master/Slave

If I understand the master/slave configuration correctly, all instructions for both hard drives go to/through the master drive. If the instructions are destined for the slave drive they have to be routed to there by the electronics on the master hard drive. This would slow down the speed of accessing or writing information to the slave drive somewhat.

If that is correcty, then this may not be the sole cause of the speed difference but it could have a noticable effect. As others have said buffer size, rotational speed, fragmentation, and the seek latency of the individual drive also play a role.

so far, I agree with all of everyone's opinions, however I would like to add some insite to the fragmentation possiblity.

I do not have any proof of this, just personal experience, but the size of the partition on the 160g HD also can play a factor. If you are not defraging and have 1 hell-of-a-large partition, you can really kill the speed of any drive. If you were to create multiple partitions of the 160g drive, fragmentation is limited and also requires less defrags.

Take that for what you will, and again, just my own person belief.

The information to/from the slave drive doesn't travel through the master drive.

Yes. Regardless of the specs on the drive, defragging it regularly will help speed it up. I dont think you need to do it every week unless you are adding, deleting, or moving a lot of files around on that drive, but a regular defrag schedule is a must.