3.5 external vs 2.5 internal mechanical drives

Dumphole · 22 May 2017 at 05:06

Hi guys,

I'm about to swap cases from an enthoo evolve tg to a 460x. I have a custom loop that I'll rebuild into the 460x but I have a hdd choice to make.

I have 3 2.5" drives on the go and 1 3.5" drive. With a custom loop there is no room for 3.5" drives in the 460x case so I have a choice which is either converting my 3.5 hdd to an external drive or bin it and swap all its data onto the 1tb 2.5 hdd I have.

Which would you go for?

I can't buy a great big ssd as they're silly money so I need to make do with what I have.

Philtor · 22 May 2017 at 22:03

I would buy a small capacity SSD to use as a boot drive then use the 2.5" drive for storing your media on assuming it's not too slow.

Dumphole · 22 May 2017 at 23:22

I have that already. My boot is an m.2, I have a 120gb 2.5" ssd to Star citizen and a 500gb for my most played games. I also have a 2tb 3.5" hdd for games I play less often and a 1tb 2.5" drive for recording gameplay. The problem I have is the 460x case I'm building my system into won't have space for a 3.5"hdd internally once I've rebuilt my wc loop into it so I need to decide whether to turn my 3.5"hdd into an external drive via a usb 3.0 enclosure or, transfer all my games from that onto the 1tb 2.5" drive.

ELiTECH · 23 May 2017 at 01:16

I would also go with the internal 2.5" drive, you can install it and forget about it, whereas the idea of having an external drive plugged in, would just get in the way and looking unsightly, due to how large 3.5" drives are.
I would also however go with a 7200rpm 2.5" drive, something like the WD Black edition drives.

ExoMale · 27 May 2017 at 12:55

3.5 enclosures use its own power adapter, Any USB version would be quite expensive, I use a 2.5 enclosure with a small hdd for certain backups and files etc I can move to any computer and I have a proper 2.5 USB powered external for my Xbox one, I do however have 2 x 1tb 3.5 internal and a 500gb 3.5 internal boot drive in my computer and recently took out a 750gb, however for me If I keep my computer I could get a single 2tb 3.5 drive for cheap which would offer the better solution, so I would say that could be your solution also apart from using a 2.5 drive instead if possible?

External enclosure would be cheaper depending what you went for, but having a single big drive of 2-4tb would be easier and make more sense