Slashdot Mirror
2.5" Drives On the Desktop
An anonymous reader points out an article on XYZ Computing exploring the use of a 2.5" notebook hard drive in a desktop computer. From the article: "The tradeoff for these qualities has always been limited capacities, high costs, and slow transfer rates, but a the recent progression in portable storage techology has changed the 2.5" drive greatly. We put the Seagate Momentus 5400.3 160GB SATA notebook drive in our test system and took it for a spin."
Some Dell SX series desktop machines already use 2.5" drives.
While that's true of what they're saying in this article, some of the fastest hard drives available right now are 2.5" drives. Check out the Hitachi Ultrastar 15K147 SAS. Average seek of 3.6ms, sustained data rate of 93.3MB/sec... All in a nice little 2.5" package. Of course, the 147GB model sucks down 12 watts at idle, but that's the price you pay for performance. Size, however, is no longer a price you pay for performance.
How can anybody write an article about 2.5" drives in desktops without even mentioning the Amiga 600 (1992).
I think the news here is about faster 2.5" drives, not the possibility to put a 2.5" drive in a desktop. As that has been done for decades.
Why? Because it's hard to fit a normal sized system disk in a 3U server with 16 drive bays. There's a tiny sliver of space above the drives that can hold a laptop CD ROM, Floppy, and 2.5" Hard drive. I've built several of these as head nodes for clusters using dual 3ware SATA RAID controllers and quad AMD boards. The new Escalade cards use Infiniband wiring from the RAID cards to the SATA backplane, so there's only four cables instead of sixteen, which is much nicer than trying to fit 16 SATA cables, two IDE cables, a floppy cable and 8 power cables past the six fans that sit in the middle of the box.
Yes, yes I can picture a Beowulf cluster of those, though I actually use ROCKS.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton