300-400gb ?????

[CADtech]

Are these newer lager capacity hard drives more prone to failure?.. what i mean is and this may of been a stupid question to all those computer experts out there but it just seems like larger drives have more area to go wrong..hmm i dunno.. also are the larger drives a lot slower since it as a larger area to seek... or does partitioning your drives cut down on such things.

thanks

 

[fishmahn]

Larger capacity drives are faster because there's more data available per revolution.

There's basically 2 ways to increase capacity on a drive. 1) Increase the density of data per square inch, or 2) increase the number of disks (platters) and r/w heads.

You slightly increase the chance of having a data problem on more platters or denser data, but today's drives have error detection and correction included in the drive electronics so that issue is more than overcome.

Within a drive family (i.e. WD Raptor 10k rpm), the larger capacity drive usually (almost always) has more platters, so the physical seek times are the same, but it can transfer data faster because it moves the heads half as much for 'X' amount of data being read or written (since there are more heads).

Mike.

 

[Codesmith]

greater density + same RPM = faster transfers