2.5" hard disks

Ghost · 21 Aug 2007 at 16:30

this may be a completely daft question, but i shall ask any way. is there any difference between a 2.5" and 3.5" (sata 2) power input if trying to connect them internally to a desktop/workstation/server?

also any issues with using them in raid arrays and i know sas drives are the same size and just super quick. these questions as i am currently looking to further customise my pc. any help would be great

cavemanoc · 21 Aug 2007 at 17:07

The connections are identical. It is just the physical size of the drive that is different. The 2.5" drives tend to be slower than their Desktop counterparts, but then they are quieter, use less power, and smaller. You will need to decide whether you want the 5400Rpm or 7200Rpm models, and obviously the power/noise issue comes up again.

You can raid the 2.5" drives exactly as you would the 3.5 inch ones.

SAS is a completely different animal - It is Serial Attached Scsi, not Sata2 and requires a dedicated controller card (although you can attach Sata drives to SAS controllers which is pretty neat)

Ghost · 21 Aug 2007 at 17:12

thanks for clearing it up for me, and i have looked at sas in great depth, it is a very interesting beast, fast and small, i just can afford them

and as for the laptop HDD surely raided they would be quicker? as i have seen the 7200 rpm ones on overclockers and they have a seek time which isnt far off that of there larger couterparts

cavemanoc · 21 Aug 2007 at 17:41

They will be much quicker Raided. The difference in speed between the 2 formats is not much anymore - the 7200.10 (3.5") Seagates get about 80mb/s max and the 7200.2 (2.5") gets about 70mb/s. Obviously the Laptop drives are considerably more expensive, but it just depends what your priorities are.

The only thing I'd say about SAS is that the Price is still quite high compared with the older SCSI u320 standard as they are a 'newer' technology with a smaller market share. This means that you can get the same speed drives (ie the 15k5 generation from seagate) from u320 as you can from SAS but for considerably less cash!

SAS will clearly take over, but during the transition there are some great bargains to be had!

david25 · 22 Aug 2007 at 20:08

This one gets close to desktop speeds

http://www.storagereview.com/HTS722020K9A00.sr

cavemanoc said:
The connections are identical. It is just the physical size of the drive that is different. The 2.5" drives tend to be slower than their Desktop counterparts, but then they are quieter, use less power, and smaller. You will need to decide whether you want the 5400Rpm or 7200Rpm models, and obviously the power/noise issue comes up again.

You can raid the 2.5" drives exactly as you would the 3.5 inch ones.

SAS is a completely different animal - It is Serial Attached Scsi, not Sata2 and requires a dedicated controller card (although you can attach Sata drives to SAS controllers which is pretty neat)