I found these handy hard disk performance charts at Tom's Hardware: LINK.
You choose two hard disks to compare in the combo boxes at the top and choose the benchmark you are interested in with the third combo box.
My link by default will take you to the comparison of the Hitachi 160GB disk (which is the one in the new Macbook pros) and the Fujitsu 200GB 4200rpm. Do we know yet if that is the 200GB drive Apple is using? In any case, it is the only 200GB 4200rpm drive in the list.
The result: See for yourself, but overall the 160GB drive is significantly faster.
The list also has results for the Fujitsu MHV2120BH, which I assume is a very close relative to the Fujitsu MHW2120BH used as the 120GB option in the MacBook Pros?
Regarding the argument that its just a matter of partitioning the bigger hard drive: Compare the maximum read/write transfer rates. That is the performance you can hope to get in the outermost sectors of the hard drive. Note that the 160GB is significantly faster here as well when compared to the 200GB drive. 45MB/s vs 36MB/s. This means that no, partitioning will not make these two drives perform the same. It might help though to get slightly better performance than without partitioning. But ideally I would hope that OSX automatically organizes files on the disk such that system files end up in the outermost/fastest sectors.
You choose two hard disks to compare in the combo boxes at the top and choose the benchmark you are interested in with the third combo box.
My link by default will take you to the comparison of the Hitachi 160GB disk (which is the one in the new Macbook pros) and the Fujitsu 200GB 4200rpm. Do we know yet if that is the 200GB drive Apple is using? In any case, it is the only 200GB 4200rpm drive in the list.
The result: See for yourself, but overall the 160GB drive is significantly faster.
The list also has results for the Fujitsu MHV2120BH, which I assume is a very close relative to the Fujitsu MHW2120BH used as the 120GB option in the MacBook Pros?
Regarding the argument that its just a matter of partitioning the bigger hard drive: Compare the maximum read/write transfer rates. That is the performance you can hope to get in the outermost sectors of the hard drive. Note that the 160GB is significantly faster here as well when compared to the 200GB drive. 45MB/s vs 36MB/s. This means that no, partitioning will not make these two drives perform the same. It might help though to get slightly better performance than without partitioning. But ideally I would hope that OSX automatically organizes files on the disk such that system files end up in the outermost/fastest sectors.