Hard drives dont slow down because they get ‘heavier’. Hard drive heads dont pick up and put down physical things for bytes. The hard drive head just changes the magnetic orientation of the surface of each bit. The weight of a platter remains constant.

By default in most linux distro’s, the hard drive is never spun down. I’m sure there are exceptions with more exotic hardware, but on Arch, unless you use hdparm to set a spindown time on a disk, the disk will keep spinning. So, there’s no loss of time from spinning it up again.

As for not using the software you’re comfortable with, that’s also silly. Chances are with software that you are used to using, you’re more efficient. You’ll save real time using an application that you’re more comfortable with, and is better designed — even if it is big. What’s the point using a small featureless program, when you are manually — and more slowly — imitate the features of another program. Sure, you save 0.5s on startup, but you waste 5minutes doing something the long way.

Improving usability is the best way to speed things up, not smaller programs.