EDIT: Oops, I misread. Fixing:

No, the size doesn't, but other aspects of the HDD definitely do, such as seek time and cache size. The size CAN affect speed in an indirect way, but that depends more on the level of fragmentation than the actual size--it's just that when you have a larger drive, fragmentation will slow your system down more slowly, since fragments need to spread out more before they start chopping up all the good 'real estate' on the drive.

The three prime things that affect a computer's speed are:

CPU
RAM
HDD

The hard drive is by FAR the anchor that slows the rest of the system down to its level, being far and away the slowest component of the three. For example, if a program you're running is writing files to the hard drive, you've go the CPU giving the instructions to write the files from the RAM to the HDD. Now, while the writing occurs, the way-faster-by-comparison CPU and RAM are literally sitting there waiting for the writes to occur before moving on to the next instruction.

While getting more RAM is probably the cheapest way to speed up a PC a bit, getting a faster hard drive (as in seek time) and/or one with a larger cache will definitely make a difference.
Source(s):
Personal experience

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