Loren Pechtel wrote:
On Sun, 14 Sep 2014 14:16:57 +0100, kathy wrote:

Can I pick your brains about a hard drive upgrade.

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.




2.5" drives are slower than 3.5" drives. I would only use a 2.5"
drive if I had to (laptop, USB power only) or if it was a SSD.
(There's no speed penalty with SSDs.)

I would concentrate most of my energy, in finding
a drive brand that was reliable. Reading the reviews,
find out how long they last and so on.

The Velociraptor is a 2.5" drive which comes
with its own heatsink and 3.5" carrier. It
is 10000 RPM, and spins faster than many other
desktop drives. The 600GB one, reads out at
180MB/sec. But these boutique drives aren't
for everyone. These ones could be refurbs rather
than new (the low price is a hint).

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822236244

There are even some out there, that come without the cooler,
and the available information suggests to take special care
cooling them.

I think rather than fall in all those sort of
traps, a plain ordinary 3.5" drive for $60 is a
better deal. After looking through the reviews
to find which ones are dropping dead too fast.

In terms of reliability, the 2.5" 5400 RPM ones look
good, but those would be slow (seek speed). The 2.5" 7200 RPM
look like they're a less good deal, as the reviews for
those are no longer 5 out of 5. The 3.5" drives are pretty
well uniformly bad, and finding a winner there involves
a lot of luck. Each generation can be better or worse than
the previous. For example, I had to stop buying my favorite
drive (again), after the new model showed itself to be
a dog (the price drop was a hint something changed).

The hard drive manufacturers know *exactly* what they're
doing. Just like in the car industry, they have tables
for bearing designs, which trade lifetime versus cost.
When a bearing fails on your car, some engineer just
nods his head and checks the tick mark on the chart.
"As designed". At one time, designs used over-engineering
because we didn't know any better. And as the tools improve,
every aspect of quality versus price is known. So whatever
comes from Seagate or WD, they know what the tradeoffs were.
There are no "surprises". If they want to make drives that
last like toilet paper, they can.

Paul