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POST: Why to never buy 3.5" external HDD's
Interesting post. Is he right not to buy external 3.5 HDDs?
++++ http://forum.piriform.com/?showtopic=37513 Posted 24 December 2012 - 05:15 PM Why to never buy 3.5" external HDD's? A good number of reasons. But 2.5" are ok. If I haven't warned you guys & gals before then read up! 1- The drives that go into these external enclosures, like the WD MyBook series for example, are sub-standard. 2- More surface errors. Externals have more errors on the surface right out of the factory than their equivalent desktop models do. Every single HDD ever made in the entire world has surface defects. But externals have more than their desktop counterparts. Every HDD comes with a bad sector map. The defective spots are recorded in a chart and the drive skips over them, substituting a bad sector with one from a reserve area. Thus the disk "presents" a 100% error free drive to the OS. And in the old days, you had to manually enter the defective sector list by hand according to certification chart taped to the drive at time of mfg. Today it is stored in th firmware. Accessing these spare areas takes a few mSec more than a normal sequential sector - because the head has to swing to the reserve area. This latency (for external disks) is buried out of sight deep inside the USB interface. But on a hi-performace Enterprise class drive, speed loss due to defect remappings are noticable and thus they get the best platters. 3- Balance. You'll note that on average external drives generate more vibration. This is from sub-standard bearings in the motor/spindle and out of round platters. While each HDD (if you take it apart) seems ultra- precise, there's a real difference when looking at their tolerances on a microscopic scale. 4- Cheaper engineering. You'll find less cache in externals along with single processor cores as opposed to 2 and 4 core controllers. That, and number of heads. As the number of heads increase, the reliability decreases. The desktop equivalent will have less surfaces, thus less parts to fail, and fail they do! 5- Overall machining tolerances and materials are worse in the externals. The materials are more sensitive to temperature changes, parts expand and contract more, producing different geometries of the heads and surfaces, and therefore requiring more compensation from the electronics to keep things on track. Incidentally, this creates more heat. Typically 5-10`C. Might as well throw in +5`C more due to rougher and less than "perfect" machining of the bearings. And unbalanced platters require a bit more current to keep them spinning steadily. More stress more heat. Unbalanced platters add about 3`C to overall tempertature gain. All this consipires to compound things. The metallic coating (where your data is stored) has its coercivity affected by hotter temps, and presents a less defined magnetic pattern. 6- Larger parts, platters, actuator arms, motors, bearings, fly-height adjusters, micro-positioners, voice coils, things like that, it all takes more power to operate. 7- Lack of any form of cooling! That's correct. There is no cooling fan anywhere in most external disks! You're taking a desktop drive and basically putting it into a box. No air circulation. You don't do this with your desktop drives do you? You've got some kind of airflow, or if not, you've got the disk attached to a metal frame that absorbs some heat. In an external USB-style drive you don't any of those two cooling mechanisms. You might as well put the disk in a baggie and then a shoe box. This one factor alone is responsible for the high failure rate of external disks! Externals can typically run 20-30`C higher than their desktop cousins. A hotter running disk from the get-go, trapped in a box with no ventilation, is just asking for trouble. And manufacturers know this! Evidenced by the shorter warranty 1-year vs. 3 or 5 years! They know the disks will fail, they know about the lack of cooling as the #1 reason. They are too cheap to put in a $5 fan, citing a number of excuses - one of which, ironically, is extra moving parts. --------------- I've seen Western Digital external drives run at a blistering 68`C !! How can you expect a cheap consumer grade product to operate reliably under those conditions. You can't! And I have to say that over the years I've had many drives both professionally and personally, and without a doubt, every single Western Digital 3.5" external disk that has no cooling fan has died prematurely. ALL OF THEM! 100% fail. Manufacturers expect this. They expect a short lifespan. They know this. Remember that 1-year warranty as opposed to 3-years or 5-years! It should be noted that 2.5" disks don't exhibit many of those cascading failure scenarios. They are engineered to work in an enclosed compartment with no ventilation. A laptop! They handle vibration better. Parts are smaller, better spec'd. Less stress, less power consumption. Better surface verification procedures. All a necessity with the higher density of 2.5" platters and portable environment. So if you're looking for external USB disks buy only 2.5", afterall these smaller drives were engineered for the portable environment from the ground up. They were not afterthoughts and hey let's do this types of hacks. And eventually, once SSD's become ready for the consumer market, then I will recommend those. For now, stick with 1TB 2.5" externals for your cost-effective storage needs. Get two 1TB 2.5" disks as opposed to a single 2TB 3.5" external. |
#2
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POST: Why to never buy 3.5" external HDD's
On 1/04/2016 9:11 PM, flo-rate wrote:
Interesting post. Is he right not to buy external 3.5 HDDs? Most 2.5 inch external hard disk are 5400RPM. I supposed 3.5 inch ones could go 7200RPM. But then USB 3.0 might not be fast enough to handle the increased data transfer rate. Anyway, there are USB 3.0 and/or eSATA docking stations for both 2.5 and 3.5 inches ones, if you don't mind running a hard disk naked. -- @~@ Remain silent. Nothing from soldiers and magicians is real! / v \ Simplicity is Beauty! May the Force and farces be with you! /( _ )\ (Fedora release 23) Linux 4.4.6-300.fc23.x86_64 ^ ^ 23:30:01 up 4 days 14:28 0 users load average: 1.01 1.03 1.05 不借貸! 不詐騙! 不援交! 不打交! 不打劫! 不自殺! 請考慮綜援 (CSSA): http://www.swd.gov.hk/tc/index/site_...sub_addressesa |
#3
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POST: Why to never buy 3.5" external HDD's
On 1/04/2016 9:11 PM, flo-rate wrote:
Get two 1TB 2.5" disks as opposed to a single 2TB 3.5" external. What if you need to backup more than 1TB of data? How do you draw the line? -- @~@ Remain silent. Nothing from soldiers and magicians is real! / v \ Simplicity is Beauty! May the Force and farces be with you! /( _ )\ (Fedora release 23) Linux 4.4.6-300.fc23.x86_64 ^ ^ 23:30:01 up 4 days 14:28 0 users load average: 1.01 1.03 1.05 不借貸! 不詐騙! 不援交! 不打交! 不打劫! 不自殺! 請考慮綜援 (CSSA): http://www.swd.gov.hk/tc/index/site_...sub_addressesa |
#4
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POST: Why to never buy 3.5" external HDD's
flo-rate wrote:
Interesting post. Is he right not to buy external 3.5 HDDs? ++++ http://forum.piriform.com/?showtopic=37513 Posted 24 December 2012 - 05:15 PM Why to never buy 3.5" external HDD's? A good number of reasons. But 2.5" are ok. If I haven't warned you guys & gals before then read up! 1- The drives that go into these external enclosures, like the WD MyBook series for example, are sub-standard. 2- More surface errors. Externals have more errors on the surface right out of the factory than their equivalent desktop models do. Every single HDD ever made in the entire world has surface defects. But externals have more than their desktop counterparts. Every HDD comes with a bad sector map. The defective spots are recorded in a chart and the drive skips over them, substituting a bad sector with one from a reserve area. Thus the disk "presents" a 100% error free drive to the OS. And in the old days, you had to manually enter the defective sector list by hand according to certification chart taped to the drive at time of mfg. Today it is stored in th firmware. Accessing these spare areas takes a few mSec more than a normal sequential sector - because the head has to swing to the reserve area. This latency (for external disks) is buried out of sight deep inside the USB interface. But on a hi-performace Enterprise class drive, speed loss due to defect remappings are noticable and thus they get the best platters. 3- Balance. You'll note that on average external drives generate more vibration. This is from sub-standard bearings in the motor/spindle and out of round platters. While each HDD (if you take it apart) seems ultra- precise, there's a real difference when looking at their tolerances on a microscopic scale. 4- Cheaper engineering. You'll find less cache in externals along with single processor cores as opposed to 2 and 4 core controllers. That, and number of heads. As the number of heads increase, the reliability decreases. The desktop equivalent will have less surfaces, thus less parts to fail, and fail they do! 5- Overall machining tolerances and materials are worse in the externals. The materials are more sensitive to temperature changes, parts expand and contract more, producing different geometries of the heads and surfaces, and therefore requiring more compensation from the electronics to keep things on track. Incidentally, this creates more heat. Typically 5-10`C. Might as well throw in +5`C more due to rougher and less than "perfect" machining of the bearings. And unbalanced platters require a bit more current to keep them spinning steadily. More stress more heat. Unbalanced platters add about 3`C to overall tempertature gain. All this consipires to compound things. The metallic coating (where your data is stored) has its coercivity affected by hotter temps, and presents a less defined magnetic pattern. 6- Larger parts, platters, actuator arms, motors, bearings, fly-height adjusters, micro-positioners, voice coils, things like that, it all takes more power to operate. 7- Lack of any form of cooling! That's correct. There is no cooling fan anywhere in most external disks! You're taking a desktop drive and basically putting it into a box. No air circulation. You don't do this with your desktop drives do you? You've got some kind of airflow, or if not, you've got the disk attached to a metal frame that absorbs some heat. In an external USB-style drive you don't any of those two cooling mechanisms. You might as well put the disk in a baggie and then a shoe box. This one factor alone is responsible for the high failure rate of external disks! Externals can typically run 20-30`C higher than their desktop cousins. A hotter running disk from the get-go, trapped in a box with no ventilation, is just asking for trouble. And manufacturers know this! Evidenced by the shorter warranty 1-year vs. 3 or 5 years! They know the disks will fail, they know about the lack of cooling as the #1 reason. They are too cheap to put in a $5 fan, citing a number of excuses - one of which, ironically, is extra moving parts. --------------- I've seen Western Digital external drives run at a blistering 68`C !! How can you expect a cheap consumer grade product to operate reliably under those conditions. You can't! And I have to say that over the years I've had many drives both professionally and personally, and without a doubt, every single Western Digital 3.5" external disk that has no cooling fan has died prematurely. ALL OF THEM! 100% fail. Manufacturers expect this. They expect a short lifespan. They know this. Remember that 1-year warranty as opposed to 3-years or 5-years! It should be noted that 2.5" disks don't exhibit many of those cascading failure scenarios. They are engineered to work in an enclosed compartment with no ventilation. A laptop! They handle vibration better. Parts are smaller, better spec'd. Less stress, less power consumption. Better surface verification procedures. All a necessity with the higher density of 2.5" platters and portable environment. So if you're looking for external USB disks buy only 2.5", afterall these smaller drives were engineered for the portable environment from the ground up. They were not afterthoughts and hey let's do this types of hacks. And eventually, once SSD's become ready for the consumer market, then I will recommend those. For now, stick with 1TB 2.5" externals for your cost-effective storage needs. Get two 1TB 2.5" disks as opposed to a single 2TB 3.5" external. The problem with your analysis is that you imply there is a separate production line with all the extra costs of additional tooling and manpower to produce sub-standard external 3.5" HDDs. Those are produced one the same assembly line using the same personnel using the same tooling and the same parts as the internal 3.5" HDDs. The testing of the finished product determines in which cost market the item gets sold. This is the same with CPUs: those that can test at higher speed are priced higher, those that fail the standard test but pass at slower speed are priced lower. Same production line but resulting in different grades of products. Nothing new here. Also, the way you present your arguments is that a 3.5" or 2.5" external drive requires that it be pre-built by someone else. Build your own. Then you get to determine the quality of all the components. That's why I still build my own home PC and why we build are own test rigs at work for the alpha lab. They don't end up being cheaper than pre-builts which are constructed based on specifications (so quality and brand and model of components change depending on what the purchasing agent decided to get cheapest that week). Instead of paying someone else their overhead and profit margin for a pre-built, buy the components at higher quality and, of course, higher priced. When you get done, your own-built will be the same price, or a bit higher, because you aren't charging yourself for your time and effort to build the thing but you have higher-priced higher-quality gear. Pre-built external HDDs are often built to be green. They power off or spin down to save power. Some external HDDs have "green" drives which make it impossible to use them for long backup jobs as the program will eventually hang or timeout because the HDD won't wake up or take too long to wakeup. Because of the cooling problem (with no fan and non-ventilated cases), they need to keep the HDD spun down as often as possible. Spinning up an HDD taxes its components: surge current through the motor that experiences higher torque to start spinning the stopped platters, heads no longer flying off the platter surface, surge current through the electronics, and thermal flex due to change in temperature. More power cycling an HDD results in a shorter lifespan. If you build your own, you can stay away from green drives and use those that are designed for 24x7 constant spinning usage. You can also pay more money for enterprise-grade HDDs but your build won't be more expensive because you're not paying you to build the external HDD. You just pay for the parts. Note that external HDDs rarely have active air circulation. There is no fan (unless you build your own using a case that has a fan). That's why pre-built external HDDs have slower rotating platters: less heat. The pre-builts rely solely on convection to move the hot air away from the HDD. When building your own, you can get a case with better passive circulation (more and bigger ventilation holes) or even use a case with a fan. Build your own and you get to choose the specifications and quality of the parts that go into your build. External HDDs are pretty easy to build. All pre-builts are sub-standard to what YOU can build for the same cost to you. So how hard is it to build your own external HDD (whether using good quality 2.5" or 3.5" HDDs)? Not very. Slide the HDD inside the case, connect the cables or slide the HDD into the connector, and close. The hardest part is probably getting the tiny case screws to stay in place until you get at them with the tiny screwdriver (so you'll need one if not supplied). Of course, if YOU buy the cheapest components for the build then you are doing the same thing the pre-builts are doing except then they tack on their profit margin and overhead. Which is better for quality: a pre-built sandwich you get out of a vending machine or one you build yourself at home? |
#5
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POST: Why to never buy 3.5" external HDD's
On 4/1/2016 8:11 AM, flo-rate wrote:
Interesting post. Is he right not to buy external 3.5 HDDs? ++++ http://forum.piriform.com/?showtopic=37513 Posted 24 December 2012 - 05:15 PM Why to never buy 3.5" external HDD's? A good number of reasons. But 2.5" are ok. If I haven't warned you guys & gals before then read up! Nope. Especially when I need the 6 TB of space. Lynn |
#6
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POST: Why to never buy 3.5" external HDD's
I have a WD external 3.5, and a couple of 2.5's.
The 3.5 I moved into a USB 3.0 case as it came as 2.0. For long backups, I have to run a little desk fan at the 3.5 to keep it cool, which works fine. The 3.5 HD is indeed very slow and it does have a tiny cache. It's a model meant for Tivos and the like. The article is very old -- you can get a 3TB WD 2.5 now. These drives come set to unload the heads after a certain timeo of inactivity. It was only 3 seconds! I don't know what it is now. They can't take as many unloads as you'd think. I use KeepAlive to make sure they don't unload, by writing a little file every 2 seconds. Of course, if you just hook the drive up for backups, then it's nothing to worry about. If it's a file server, then you'd have to worry. My WD 2.5 is actually a drive with a USB port in it as the only interface. For convenience, easy storage, and the ability to be driven by a USB port, the 2.5's win for me. I'll never buy another 3.5. -- Ed Light |
#7
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POST: Why to never buy 3.5" external HDD's
On 4/1/2016 9:11 AM, flo-rate wrote:
Interesting post. Is he right not to buy external 3.5 HDDs? ++++ http://forum.piriform.com/?showtopic=37513 Posted 24 December 2012 - 05:15 PM Why to never buy 3.5" external HDD's? A good number of reasons. But 2.5" are ok. If I haven't warned you guys & gals before then read up! 1- The drives that go into these external enclosures, like the WD MyBook series for example, are sub-standard. 2- More surface errors. Externals have more errors on the surface right out of the factory than their equivalent desktop models do. Every single HDD ever made in the entire world has surface defects. But externals have more than their desktop counterparts. You buy a normal desktop drive. You buy an empty external enclosure, which may house one or more drives. You insert your desktop drive into the external enclosure and connect it to your computer via esata, usb, firewire, or whatever and you have an external drive. Voila ! I learned early on that buying drives advertised as "external" drives in some external enclosure is foolish. Then I bought an IcyDock external enclosure with fans and easy connections, 3.5" desktop drives I have used as backup drives in the external enclosure, and I couldn't be happier. The enclosure is hot-swappable and has worked flawlessly as a backup system, with Gparted Live or PartedMagic Live, or Minitools Live, since I started using it. The author of the article may be giving good advice not to buy 3.5" drives advertised as external drives, but there is never any need to do this as normal 3.5" desktop drives in an external enclosure works just fine. |
#8
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POST: Why to never buy 3.5" external HDD's
On Fri, 1 Apr 2016 11:37:43 -0500, VanguardLH wrote :
flo-rate wrote: Interesting post. Is he right not to buy external 3.5 HDDs? ++++ http://forum.piriform.com/?showtopic=37513 Posted 24 December 2012 - 05:15 PM Why to never buy 3.5" external HDD's? A good number of reasons. But 2.5" are ok. If I haven't warned you guys & gals before then read up! 1- The drives that go into these external enclosures, like the WD MyBook series for example, are sub-standard. 2- More surface errors. Externals have more errors on the surface right out of the factory than their equivalent desktop models do. Every single HDD ever made in the entire world has surface defects. But externals have more than their desktop counterparts. Every HDD comes with a bad sector map. The defective spots are recorded in a chart and the drive skips over them, substituting a bad sector with one from a reserve area. Thus the disk "presents" a 100% error free drive to the OS. And in the old days, you had to manually enter the defective sector list by hand according to certification chart taped to the drive at time of mfg. Today it is stored in th firmware. Accessing these spare areas takes a few mSec more than a normal sequential sector - because the head has to swing to the reserve area. This latency (for external disks) is buried out of sight deep inside the USB interface. But on a hi-performace Enterprise class drive, speed loss due to defect remappings are noticable and thus they get the best platters. 3- Balance. You'll note that on average external drives generate more vibration. This is from sub-standard bearings in the motor/spindle and out of round platters. While each HDD (if you take it apart) seems ultra- precise, there's a real difference when looking at their tolerances on a microscopic scale. 4- Cheaper engineering. You'll find less cache in externals along with single processor cores as opposed to 2 and 4 core controllers. That, and number of heads. As the number of heads increase, the reliability decreases. The desktop equivalent will have less surfaces, thus less parts to fail, and fail they do! 5- Overall machining tolerances and materials are worse in the externals. The materials are more sensitive to temperature changes, parts expand and contract more, producing different geometries of the heads and surfaces, and therefore requiring more compensation from the electronics to keep things on track. Incidentally, this creates more heat. Typically 5-10`C. Might as well throw in +5`C more due to rougher and less than "perfect" machining of the bearings. And unbalanced platters require a bit more current to keep them spinning steadily. More stress more heat. Unbalanced platters add about 3`C to overall tempertature gain. All this consipires to compound things. The metallic coating (where your data is stored) has its coercivity affected by hotter temps, and presents a less defined magnetic pattern. 6- Larger parts, platters, actuator arms, motors, bearings, fly-height adjusters, micro-positioners, voice coils, things like that, it all takes more power to operate. 7- Lack of any form of cooling! That's correct. There is no cooling fan anywhere in most external disks! You're taking a desktop drive and basically putting it into a box. No air circulation. You don't do this with your desktop drives do you? You've got some kind of airflow, or if not, you've got the disk attached to a metal frame that absorbs some heat. In an external USB-style drive you don't any of those two cooling mechanisms. You might as well put the disk in a baggie and then a shoe box. This one factor alone is responsible for the high failure rate of external disks! Externals can typically run 20-30`C higher than their desktop cousins. A hotter running disk from the get-go, trapped in a box with no ventilation, is just asking for trouble. And manufacturers know this! Evidenced by the shorter warranty 1-year vs. 3 or 5 years! They know the disks will fail, they know about the lack of cooling as the #1 reason. They are too cheap to put in a $5 fan, citing a number of excuses - one of which, ironically, is extra moving parts. --------------- I've seen Western Digital external drives run at a blistering 68`C !! How can you expect a cheap consumer grade product to operate reliably under those conditions. You can't! And I have to say that over the years I've had many drives both professionally and personally, and without a doubt, every single Western Digital 3.5" external disk that has no cooling fan has died prematurely. ALL OF THEM! 100% fail. Manufacturers expect this. They expect a short lifespan. They know this. Remember that 1-year warranty as opposed to 3-years or 5-years! It should be noted that 2.5" disks don't exhibit many of those cascading failure scenarios. They are engineered to work in an enclosed compartment with no ventilation. A laptop! They handle vibration better. Parts are smaller, better spec'd. Less stress, less power consumption. Better surface verification procedures. All a necessity with the higher density of 2.5" platters and portable environment. So if you're looking for external USB disks buy only 2.5", afterall these smaller drives were engineered for the portable environment from the ground up. They were not afterthoughts and hey let's do this types of hacks. And eventually, once SSD's become ready for the consumer market, then I will recommend those. For now, stick with 1TB 2.5" externals for your cost-effective storage needs. Get two 1TB 2.5" disks as opposed to a single 2TB 3.5" external. The problem with your analysis is that you imply there is a separate production line with all the extra costs of additional tooling and manpower to produce sub-standard external 3.5" HDDs. Those are produced one the same assembly line using the same personnel using the same tooling and the same parts as the internal 3.5" HDDs. The testing of the finished product determines in which cost market the item gets sold. This is the same with CPUs: those that can test at higher speed are priced higher, those that fail the standard test but pass at slower speed are priced lower. Same production line but resulting in different grades of products. Nothing new here. Also, the way you present your arguments is that a 3.5" or 2.5" external drive requires that it be pre-built by someone else. Build your own. Then you get to determine the quality of all the components. That's why I still build my own home PC and why we build are own test rigs at work for the alpha lab. They don't end up being cheaper than pre-builts which are constructed based on specifications (so quality and brand and model of components change depending on what the purchasing agent decided to get cheapest that week). Instead of paying someone else their overhead and profit margin for a pre-built, buy the components at higher quality and, of course, higher priced. When you get done, your own-built will be the same price, or a bit higher, because you aren't charging yourself for your time and effort to build the thing but you have higher-priced higher-quality gear. Pre-built external HDDs are often built to be green. They power off or spin down to save power. Some external HDDs have "green" drives which make it impossible to use them for long backup jobs as the program will eventually hang or timeout because the HDD won't wake up or take too long to wakeup. Because of the cooling problem (with no fan and non-ventilated cases), they need to keep the HDD spun down as often as possible. Spinning up an HDD taxes its components: surge current through the motor that experiences higher torque to start spinning the stopped platters, heads no longer flying off the platter surface, surge current through the electronics, and thermal flex due to change in temperature. More power cycling an HDD results in a shorter lifespan. If you build your own, you can stay away from green drives and use those that are designed for 24x7 constant spinning usage. You can also pay more money for enterprise-grade HDDs but your build won't be more expensive because you're not paying you to build the external HDD. You just pay for the parts. Note that external HDDs rarely have active air circulation. There is no fan (unless you build your own using a case that has a fan). That's why pre-built external HDDs have slower rotating platters: less heat. The pre-builts rely solely on convection to move the hot air away from the HDD. When building your own, you can get a case with better passive circulation (more and bigger ventilation holes) or even use a case with a fan. Build your own and you get to choose the specifications and quality of the parts that go into your build. External HDDs are pretty easy to build. All pre-builts are sub-standard to what YOU can build for the same cost to you. So how hard is it to build your own external HDD (whether using good quality 2.5" or 3.5" HDDs)? Not very. Slide the HDD inside the case, connect the cables or slide the HDD into the connector, and close. The hardest part is probably getting the tiny case screws to stay in place until you get at them with the tiny screwdriver (so you'll need one if not supplied). Of course, if YOU buy the cheapest components for the build then you are doing the same thing the pre-builts are doing except then they tack on their profit margin and overhead. Which is better for quality: a pre-built sandwich you get out of a vending machine or one you build yourself at home? The post I quoted says lower spec hard drives get supplied as 3.5 inch external drives. This is very unlikely to be done by running different production lines of different qualities but by tests to determine which are substandard for use as an internal drive. That's how I read it and that's what he is describing. As you say, you could get around this problem by buying your own internal 3.5 inch drive and mounting it in a carrier with USB lead. The author suggests it's better still to buy an external 2.5 inch drive. In other words, external 3.5 inch drives are low spec drives derived from a design for internal use but external 2.5 inch drives are designed to do a better job and they seem to do it. One big problem is if you look inside what is supplied as an external 2.5 inch drive then it's anyone's guess which particular model/manufacturer drive was been used. E.G. Seagate changes between using Samsung Spinpoint or Seagate Barracuda drives for the same capacity enclosure. Also there are additonal variations from 2.5 inch drive thickness which is likely determined by the number of platters and, in turn, the platter density. So, even accepting, the poster's proposition that external 2.5 inch drives in general are better than 3.5 inch external drives, there is no easy way of telling what is inside an external 2.5 inch drive's enclosure that a particular review is testing. This would affect transfer rate, seek times, power requirement, etc. For this reason it may be better to follow your suggestion and buy an internal 3.5 inch drive of known performance (from reviews) and use it as an external drive. But who want an heavy old hot clunker of a 3.5 inch drive with it's own external power supply? One answer could be to buy a known internal 2.5 inch drive whose spec you like and mount it in an external USB enclosure. |
#9
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POST: Why to never buy 3.5" external HDD's
flo-rate wrote:
One answer could be to buy a known internal 2.5 inch drive whose spec you like and mount it in an external USB enclosure. At newegg.com, I can find a 3.5" 8 TB 7200 RPM drive at $440. For a 2.5" 7200 RPM laptop HDD, the biggest they carry is 2 TB costing $990. With the 3.5" form factor, I get 4 times the capacity at less than half the cost. Yeah, 2.5" is technically doable but at a much greater cost per byte. Of course, a 2.5" external HDD will probably fit [tightly] in your shirt pocket (as long as there is no fan) but you'll need to tote the 3.5". Who carries their 2.5" external HDD in their shirt pocket? |
#10
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POST: Why to never buy 3.5" external HDD's
On Sat, 2 Apr 2016 10:35:06 -0500, VanguardLH wrote :
flo-rate wrote: One answer could be to buy a known internal 2.5 inch drive whose spec you like and mount it in an external USB enclosure. At newegg.com, I can find a 3.5" 8 TB 7200 RPM drive at $440. For a 2.5" 7200 RPM laptop HDD, the biggest they carry is 2 TB costing $990. With the 3.5" form factor, I get 4 times the capacity at less than half the cost. Yeah, 2.5" is technically doable but at a much greater cost per byte. Of course, a 2.5" external HDD will probably fit [tightly] in your shirt pocket (as long as there is no fan) but you'll need to tote the 3.5". Who carries their 2.5" external HDD in their shirt pocket? Check those prices. Here are a 3.5 and a 2.5 drive chosen at random. Both of the same capacity for comparison. A Seagate 3.5-Inch 4TB Desktop HDD costs $115. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00B99JU4S/ A Samsung Momentus 4TB 2.5-inch Hard Drive costs $140. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00B99JU4S/ |
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