Will a bigger hard drive help my computer run faster?

I have a Dell Optiplex GX520 with 4gb Ram and an 80gb hard drive.

I am using less than 50% of my hard drive.

Is there any benefit in upgrading to a bigger hard drive?

The size of the harddrive doesn't matter as far as I understand it, however the speed of the harddrive does and how it is connected does. Thats about all I know for sure so please wait for others to give more in depth answers...

A larger hard drive is fine if you are using a large part of the one you have or intend to. It will not speed up your computer unless your old hard drive was about filled up.
You say you have 4 gigs of RAM so if your computer is running slower than normal there is likely something wrong. It seems odd that you have 4 gigs of RAM and only an 80 gig HD, did you upgrade the RAM? What speed is your hard drive? I assume you regularly do a disc clean up and a defrag? What speed is your connection to the net? Cable, DSL, Dialup? Any ongoing problems with your ISP?
This is the simple guys response, anything more complicated needs to go upstairs

This is a bit "techie" but helps explain hard drive speeds and storage.....
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=322

Its using a Celeron D processor that is not as good as a P4 of equivalent speed:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celeron
http://reviews.cnet.com/desktops/dell-opti...7-31518056.html

I do not know the upgrade path for that model so you need to check out Dell's site to see if there is a CPU upgrade.

It'll support up to a Pentium D according to Dell. They show an 800 series chip, but these run pretty hot and a custom cooling solution could be difficult since it's a BTX form factor board and case. It's possible that it would also run a 900 series Pentium D which are a bit faster due to a larger L2 cache size as well as cooler due to a smaller die size.

It runs fine.
I was just technicaly curious.
I know where I can get a 250gb Hard Drive for $20.00
When I bought this it had 516mb of RAM and "No Hard Drive"

I'm just waiting for Samsungs SSD's to come down in price and be available to everyone not just builders.... they are about $900 right now...

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/03/17/re...56g5/print.html

Here's samsungs page
http://www.samsung.com/global/business/sem...t/overview.html

All 4 of these are in the sweet spot for speed:price ratio :

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16820231256
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16820233087
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16820609394
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16820227450

All are under $400 and ~230 read and ~200 write .

Its not worth going over $400 as SATA 600 is almost here , that is when SSDs will get very interesting .


As far as mechanical drives a few things make performance better . The ones that count most are cache and bit density . Cache is the buffer for reading and writing and is far faster than the hard drive can actually talk to your system on its own so the more you have the faster the drive will perform . Bit density is how much data can be stored per platter . The higher this is the faster bits can be written and read because with the same rotation speed the bits pass the head faster the tighter they are packed together . Rotation speed matters far more than either of these two but the price jumps way up moving to the 10,000 RPM drives .


As for the system in question here (Optiplex GX520) you have a SATA150 interface for SSDs are way to fast to take advantage of . Here are some great SATA drives that would work well with your system :

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16822136319
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16822136320
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16822148445

Even though these are SATA300 drives they will work fine on your SATA150 because they are compatible with each other and platter style drives dont even come close to using the bandwidth of SATA300 , you need a SSD to do that .

Yeah I imagine there are more now its been a while since I've seriously looked into it... but this is exciting for the future of gaming and such... and its incredible how fast pc's can go with their size... some people out there are truly intelligent being able to design this stuff...