New
#11
Hi there
bigger drives -- more power consumption but until recently are far cheaper to manufacture when you need large amounts of data e.g >4 or 5 TB. The motors can be more robust -- better bearings able to run for months if not years continuously - but if getting these types of drives get the ones with the largest cache size and fastest RPM rate -- 7200 RPM is the minimum these days for acceptable performance. (10,000 RPM far better but more expensive of course).
The smaller HDD's were originally designed for laptops and were usually notoriously slow --these days the small form factor is only really used now for SSD's and even these are being gradually replaced by the NVMe type (those look a bit like small computer memory chips) which have no moving parts, almost zero power consumption and incredibly fast. However these still are limited to 1TB or less with current (affordable) technology.
For a while yet if you want large data volumes the old 3.5 inch spinner will still be around for a few years -- and on servers etc they still do a good job. Never ever get slow HDD's though -- poor I/O systems will kill even the fastest computer in the galaxy stone dead.
In all the years I've been dealing with computers the one thing that causes poor performance over anything else is poor HDD's --always assuming enough RAM and you aren't trying to run too many programs at once.
If you want to see the effect of slow HDD's -- boot up an an i7 machine Windows 3.11 running from an external floppy drive attached to the machine via a USB port -- now have fun twiddling your thumbs as the I/O on the floppy disc goes about its slow ponderous business. !!!!!
If you haven't got a floppy drive set then try using a Windows to Go system created on an old fashioned laptop HDD -- connect the laptop HDD via sata-->USB connector -- and also play the finger twiddling game !!!. BTW using Linux won't be so bad an experience when run from an external drive as it's a humungously more efficient OS so once its booted and loaded it tries to do pretty well everything in RAM making far fewer I/O calls to the HDD.
Cheers
jimbo