Housing two 2.5-inch hard disks in one 3.5-inch drive bay?

David Brown wrote
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.

Yeah, I do, mainly because they are so much cheaper.

I do buy quite a few, mainly they are for overflow from the PVR.

While 2.5" have the potential for being faster

I dont care about the speed, what I need is best $/TB and nice and
quiet and dont get warm. I use the greens for the PVR overflow.

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.

Yep, and more hassle than a single physical 1.5TB drive too.

I put them in USB/esata docking stations.

John Turco wrote
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.

MUCH better value and speed too.

Yes, I must sincerely concur (on the quietness issue, especially).
During nearly six full years of use, my main computer's pair of Samsung
SP1614N 160GB (PATA) hard disks have remained practically silent.

Yeah, my older samsungs too.

Not so, for any of their Western Digital or Maxtor predecessors,
I might add! Those babies could be heard clicking away, regularly.

Yeah, me too. I did mostly use WDs before the samsungs.

Incidentally, Rod...did you notice that I didn't edit the message I just replied to?

Yep, thanks for that.

(I know how you hate it, when previous text is deleted.)

Yeah, particularly when you tend to reply rather later than the post
you are replying too, harder to remember what was in it if its edited.