On Sun, 14 Sep 2014 15:58:30 +0200, David Brown wrote:

I have an old desktop PC with a 250 MB hard drive. I would like to
increase the storage capacity and think 500 MB may be enough.

The new drive will replace the old one.

I notice that 500 MB is a size which I can now buy in 2.5 inch format.
Is a 2.5 inch drive likely to be better (faster, lower power
consumption, etc) than a 3.5 inch drive? Are the connectors the same?

Or would it be better to install another 3.5 inch drive?

Thank you for any advice.


A 2.5" drive will be marginally lower power than a corresponding 3.5"
drive. It is also likely to be lower speed, but not so that you would
notice much. It will cost more per MB than a 3.5" drive - but you are
talking about such low capacity (for modern drives) that this will not
make much difference either. So it is not going to make a huge
difference either way.

(I assume you mean GB, not MB, in your sizes. A 500 MB disk would be
hard to find outside of a museum.)

Firstly are we talking SATA or PATA drives? SATA have a flat data cable
about a centimetre wide whereas PATA are 5 to 6 centimetres wide.

In my experience 2.5inch drives are noticeably slower than 3.5 inch
drives when I've run them on the same motherboard.

If you are SATA have you thought about an SSD? They can be much faster.

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