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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."
Its a good idea until you find out that the drive 224 dollars and 99 cents when the desktop competition runs about 70 bucks. The drives in laptop are the slowest component; I wish laptops could reverse rolls and use dektop drives instead. Maybe one day the power levels will drop to an acceptable level to do this.
I don't think there are many Mac Mini owners who wouldn't jump at the chance of a slightly larger Mac Mini with a proper hard drive. Putting laptop drives in desktops is an exceptionally bad idea.
the more they over-think the plumbing the easier it is to stop up the pipe
I am not trying to troll here, but why?
I have found notebook harddisks run hotter, they are slower, more expensive and because they are not meant for use within a tower will require some creative mounting. If you need to mount a large amount of drive space in a MicroATX, use one 600+GB drive instead of 10x60GB.
The only conclusion they came to is that it was quieter and that there were other ways of silencing your desktop. I have a pocket 2.5" in a travel case, and it isn't very quiet. One day in the future we may see this HDD form-factor taking over the desktop market as we move towards miniturization, but IMHO the technology just doesn't seem mature enough.
Proof by very large bribes. QED.
I think for the money and time wasted on that project, that you should just get a 10,000 SATA Raptor to put into a desktop. Desktop computing is all about high-end hardware compared to portable computer s (PDAs, Laptops, etc). And for a desktop having a 5400 rpm harddrive (as a new project) is pretty slow. 7200 rpm harddrives are very cheap now. Also, you're not going to find a laptop with a high Front Side Bus speed, so I don't see why there's hype on this project. That is all.
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
Like a nice, compact, almost-silent, energy-efficient, but slightly-underperforming Mac Mini?
How could anyone write a whole article about 2.5" drives in desktops without even mentioning the Mac Mini?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I may just be getting long in the tooth, but I'm starting to get nostalgic for the old sounds of the the early computer age. Back when you could put your hand against the heavy steel chassis and listen and feel to exactly what your computer was doing.
Gone is the satisfying click-click-click feedback of the heavy tactile keyboards.
Gone is the deafening WHEEEEE-WHEEEEEE-WHEEEEEE of the dot matrix printer.
Gone is the atmospheric chuk-chuk-chuk grind of the hard disk.
Gone is the ultrasonic whistle of the screen changing resolutions.
Gone is the inquisitive thuka-thuka-thuka of a floppy disk scan on bootup.
Gone is the warm handshake WEEE-ERRR-HISS of the modem.
If the POST BEEP ever dissapears, I think the beauty and mystique of a computer coming to life will have been lost forever.
Sorry folks, I just don't see a need for a smaller hard drive when shortly there won't be a need for any hard drive whatsoever.
Cheaper, faster, more reliable, higher-capacity Flash memory is coming.
I'll wait for that particular bandwagon when it comes.
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
A media center PC doesn't have to have it's own storage. The bulkier noiser components of the system can be somewhere else. There are a number of such "thin media clients" already available. One doesn't need to be limited to notions inherited from years of DOS desktop practices and capabilities.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Mac minis have been using 2.5-inch drives on the desktop for quite some time now, and Sun has been using enterprise grade 2.5-inch SAS drives on many of their newer models of servers.
The average cost for the drive under review is around $200, which isn't bad.
Compared to what exactly? You can get the same capacity, and much better performance, in a 3.5" form factor for under $50.
What I think is interesting is the cost behind setting up, say, a 4 Element SRAID system with these.
Why? For the same price, you could get four 500GB drives and have 2TB rather than 640GB... For a less than half the price, you could go with 320GB drives and have twice the space. For the same price as one 2.5" drive you could get the same 4-drive RAID as 3.5" drives.
Could heat be a problem here?
Heat (and relatedly, the somewhat lower power consumption) counts as the only advantage to using 2.5" drives. They cost more, hold less, and have shorter lifespans (They also make a more... "annoying" noise, IMO, though I don't know if I can fairly call them "louder"). Except for the niche markets of laptops and SFF/embedded, no one should ever even consider a 2.5" drive unless some design contstraint absolutely precludes the use of a 3.5".