Larger the HD, faster the bandwidth?

[rova]

Hey,

I was testing the speed of two Hard-drives in Nero ( burning software)and the 30 gig Hard-drive always seemed to be faster then the 20 gig hard-drive.

One Hard-drive is a Western Digital 20gig and nero said it puts out 20,000 KB per second

One Hard-drive is a Maxtor 30gig and nero said it puts out 29,000 KB per second.

So, bigger the Hard-drive.. faster it goes?. If so, why have 20gig hard-drives at ATA-66 or ATA-100?

-rova

[Fingers]

Here are some other thing to consider

- Are they both the same RPM? (rpm's make a big difference in sustained transfer rate)

- Are either of the hdd's on the same IDE channel as the CD burner? IDE only allows one device per channel to transmit data at a time. Everything else being equal, transfering data between two IDE devices on different IDE channels will always be faster than if they share a channel.

- ATA66/100 isn't the enhancement that the name implies. 66MB or 100MB/second is only the max possible burst speed from the HDD's relatively small buffer to the IDE controller, it has absolutely nothing to do with actually hard drive performance. Most IDE hard drives today will preform as well on ATA-33 as they to on ATA66/100.

- Partition configuration, and how much is on the drive can also affect your results.

- Also, some drives are shipped in a "quiet mode", that reduces noise by limiting the speed at which the drive operates.

I'm not saying your results are incorrect, I'm just pointing out that there are MANY thing that can affect performance and benchmark results.

[rova]

hey,

danks fingers!

Yea both of the drives have same specs, just different sizes.

I am going to try some benchmarkin to see if Nero is correct.

danks again

-rova

[jeffpapier]

Could be bigger hard drive> more platters> more read-write heads= faster score
Or when comparing two different manufacturers products, you have too many variables,cache size, control board, R/W head positioning control, interleave, ETC.