Rod Speed wrote:
David Brown wrote
Man-wai Chang to The Door (24000bps) wrote

Found such a toy in local computer shopping arcade.

Is it gonna kill both hard disks by heat?

2.5 inch disks usually generate a lot less heat than a 3.5 inch disk,
so my guess would be no.

I'm considering one of these, or perhaps 4x 2.5" in a 5.25" bay. Two
2.5 inch 500 GB disks will be around twice the price of a single 3.5"
1 TB disk, but as far as I can see they will be quieter and lower
power (even with two of them), and faster (using raid0).

My Samsung 3.5" 1.5TB drives are completely silent, you have to
listen very carefuly to see if they have spun up in a USB docking station.


I haven't paid much attention to disk drive noise or power requirements
before, but I'm planning on having several drives on a new machine (to
play around with raid) and so the total drive noise is (perhaps) going
to be noticeable. It's useful to hear people's experiences with modern
drives - "completely silent" is more helpful than "2.5 Bel" on a web
page of drive specifications.

MUCH better value and speed too.


There's no argument about value.

I had a look at some details of drives on Samsung's website, and was
somewhat surprised by some of the specification details. I had thought
that the seek time for 2.5" drives would be lower than for 3.5" drives
since the maximum movement distance is smaller. Apparently that's not
the case. And the disk-to-buffer transfer speed is almost twice as fast
for the 3.5" disks. It also seems that there is little difference in
the noise, although the the 3.5" disks take more than twice the power of
the 2.5" disks.

All in all, I think I'll be going for 3.5" disks. While 2.5" have the
potential for being faster in that you can fit more into a given space
and run them in parallel, it's just not going to be worth the money.