[82DannyB]

Hi, I was watching a video on youtube where a guy said that a hard drive's performance diminishes near the end of the platter. So, lets say you install programs on the near full side of it (lets say 450gb on a 500gb) , you cannot expect the same performance as you would at the 100gb mark of the platter. Is this true?

 

[LMiller7]

In theory, yes.
The outside tracks of the platter are longer and drive manufacturers take advantage of this by storing more sectors there. Thus, a single rotation of the disk will cover more sectors and increasing transfer rate. This is shown by some benchmarks.

But under real world conditions this means little. There are other factors other than transfer rate that govern disk performance and transfer rate is usually the least important. Transfer rate is important for large files that are accessed serially, but that just doesn't happen very often with a modern OS. Under real world conditions seek time and disk latency are more important.