2.5in RAID

skyripper · 31 Aug 2011 at 23:34

I'm both downsizing and moving... My old rig has 3x 1TB WD Green drives in a Raid5 hanging off a 3ware controller (Intel ICH9R raid gave me a bad experience one time). Thats almost 1.8TB formatted and its pretty full.

I want to put equivalent amount of storage space in the new rig and move all my data across (I'll then strip, sell and otherwise offload the old pieces to the family).

I want to use the onboard Z68 chipset this time. I also want to use 2.5in hard drives this time as I've lost all except 2x 5.25in drivebays for watercooling. I figure I can fit 4x 2.5in drives per 5.25in drivebay.

Anyone using 2.5in drives in a big array (if 2TB can be called big anymore!), and is there any noticable difference from 3.5in aside from the physical size?

rpstewart · 1 Sep 2011 at 09:35

There shouldn't be any real issues using 2.5" drives rather than 3.5" ones as far as the array is concerned.

Performance wise it's difficult to give an accurate estimate of any speed difference. 2.5" drives are generally a bit slower in terms of transfer rates - the smaller platter means less data moving under the head per rotation. That said a modern 7200rpm 2.5" drive isn't going to be hugely slower than a year or two old 5400rpm drive like your WD Greens.

So any difference is likely to be down to usage - if you're just streaming or watching media from the array then you won't notice any difference.

d_brennen · 1 Sep 2011 at 09:41

Even though 2.5" drives use less power you can't just stack them, they'll cook!

FWIW I use 2 500gb WD laptop drives for backups, taped to the back side of the motherboard tray. They don't need much airflow

skyripper · 1 Sep 2011 at 15:40

I've got a Startech 2.5in hotswap drive cage which holds 4 drives in a 5.25 bay, comes with a fan, so they'd be fine in there. I wasnt planning on just lumping them one on another loose in the case

It is just movies, music and program files directories - anything I want nice quick access to, I move it to the SSD and setup a Symbolic link.

skyripper · 3 Sep 2011 at 19:24

Got myself 3x 750GB 2.5in drives made by Samsung. The Z68 chipset has turned them into a 1.4TB Raid5 for me. I'm copying across my C: drive to it now. I'll report back some HDTune shots of the performance.

As for how I've mounted em etc. I'll throw that in my build log.

skyripper · 3 Sep 2011 at 21:54

Ran ATTO and HDTune with a variety of sizes on the new array.

I'm getting around 150Mb/s at fastest, and avg. 110Mb/s

Which is equivalent with the 3.5in drives I was using in the previous PC. Its not world shatteringly quick, but it should be resilient and I'll turn on SSD caching next.