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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.
There is a growing demand for quiet home computers, and this is going to be more commmon (especially for media center PC's). There are even people who are hoping for mobile graphics chipsets to find their way onto PCI-E cards to help with low power and silent operation. Low power systems can make a huge difference in energy conservation, and they are becoming more and more popular. Desktops with a hybrid of laptop parts are always going to beat out mainstream desktop counterparts in noise and power consumption.
The average cost for the drive under review is around $200, which isn't bad. What I think is interesting is the cost behind setting up, say, a 4 Element SRAID system with these. Could heat be a problem here?
Whatever the answer, the advance of smaller (physically) but larger (storage) has arrisen from perpendicular recording on the discs, which is itself a cool find.
ilovegeorgebush
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
"Its a good idea until you find out that the drive 224 dollars and 99 cents [newegg.com] when the desktop competition runs about 70 bucks [newegg.com]. 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."
Many laptop manufacturers now give options for 7200 spin HDD's in laptops. I have one from Dell, it somehow runs as cool and quiet as a slower 5400
You can pack quite a few 2.5" drives in a desktop to create some neat raid setups. An example would be http://www.maxpoint.com/home/products/perph/spec_p g/es-252/index.htm
You can also find solutions that will hold several more drives. This could be usefull for small form factor setups that people (myself included) use for pvrs. Small, reliable, cool running.
http://religiousfreaks.com/Some Dell SX series desktop machines already use 2.5" drives.
I think the future of desktop computing lies not in performance and speed, but size and heat output. This goes for about 95% of computer users; obviously, gamers want ultimate performance, but my parents (and the majority of computer users) would rather sacrifice the speed for silence.
And this one on the next page doesn't?
s /seagate_momentus543/m54003_01.jpg.
http://xyzcomputing.com/images/stories/articlepic
I'd say that's pretty telling.
Informatus Technologicus
The next generation of laptop hard disks have performance characteristics that are competitive with three generations old desktop hard disk drives. I fail to see a story. I'd be much more interested to see them compare these new 'hybrid' laptop hard drives with genuine top-of-the-line desktop drives.
And the newest hard disks aren't that loud. I just upgraded my iMac G5 with a WD Raptor (10kRPM SATA). You can definitely hear it more clearly when large files are being written or under swap conditions, but most of the time the difference in noise levels is indistinguishable -- meaning silent. And my subjective benchmarks reveal an almost 4x increase in the speed of common tasks.
True science means that when you re-evaluate the evidence, you re-evaluate your faith.
The cost differential might be large now, but at some point, it's going to be way cheaper in the long run to make only one type of drive for end user machines(you need a different kind of drive for servers....you just do). I have seen many desktops and alot of servers use a laptop CD/DVD drive in them. Eventually, they will make a desktop with a motherboard similar in size to a notebook motherboard, but it will have PCI Express or some other new connector for adding peripherals. You can already purchase PC card sound cards. It's a logical progression. On Dell's site, they have a new XPS machine in the notebook section and it's really just a very small and very powerful desktop. I have also seen the Pentium M being used in desktops now. The age of tall towers is going to start to wane. There will always be a need for larger cases, but those cases will now hold much more in storage and other hardware.
Gorkman
You want quiet? Solid state storage is going to catch up someday soon. I'm more than willing to wait. I'm not interested in paying three times as much for a slow notebook HD with low storage capacity.
(end of post)
I've recently grown fond of external USB2 HDD cases.
Combining an internal 2.5" drive and external USB drives would be quite practical. You could leave the external drives off (and quiet) most of the time, hot pluging them only when you need them.
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
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 desktop is dead. Long live the laptop.
I keep reading about people wanting a computer that
is quiet, energy efficient and doesn't produce 80,000
BTU of heat. Many people see the solution to the
problem as retrofitting a desktop with huge heatsinks,
remote DC power supplies, special home closets for the
computer with long KVM cables and installing laptop
hard drives in your desktops. That's just crazy talk.
Folks, bit the bullet. Pay double (versus a desktop)
for a laptop and docking station and be done with it.
I haven't had a desktop in seven years and I don't
miss it at all. It was a little rough at first with
early laptop but we have long since passed the point
where performance is limited in a laptop. My latest
laptop is an IBM Thinkpad (well, Lenovo) Z60m. With
a wide screen, 1.5GB RAM, 100-gig drive and 2gHz
Pentium M processor, it is more than fast enough
for anything 92% of all, even advanced, computer
users would want.
Docked, I am able to pretend it is a desktop, even
using it with two monitors (a requirement in my
computing book). Yet, I sip power, am quiet as a
church mouse and produce next to no heat (compared
to a desktop).
As an extra bonus, I can take my computer with me
wherever I go.
(The 8% of you who really do need a desktop need
not respond. You know who you are and why you
can't make a laptop do what you need it to do.
I'm okay with you not having a laptop.)
Matt
"Putting laptop drives in desktops is an exceptionally bad idea."
boy, that's pretty bad!
You don't leave much room in your vocabulary for people like Micheal Jackson & the guy who drove a rocket car into a mountain!
I was about to moderate as flamebait, because the first page of the article answers why.
Then I read the last page of the article, which basically says use a portable drive for a portable application. no-where would you use it in a actuall Desktop.
heck the mentioned use in a media center PC sucks, cause you will need many of the notebook drives to replace a single PC drive, then you'll want a raid setup to get the speed up, which ends up using more space than they save.
My first thought was, it would be much easier to mount a notebook drive in my tivo as the second drive (requires custom bracket, and cooling flow consideration), but the Tivo only has 2 IDE slots, and the biggest 7200rpm notebook ide drive I found was 60 GB. Hardly worth the effort, cheaper/easier/more convient to replace the first drive with 500Gb and still have plenty of $$$ left to pay for any extra power consumed.
What about the loud bang when you hit the case with the side of your fist so that the hard disk will spin up?
Yes, I had one of those...
I still think that the dot-matrix noise did actually deafen me.
> no, yes, maybe (tagging beta)
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
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
Of course now you don't have a 30 pound beast with a 5 inch screen. But it is the exact same concept.
Man, you really need that seminar!
I still have an M-Style keyboard. I don't know what I'd do without it. I agree that the noises computers used to make were soothing. They also provided very good context clues to what was "wrong" with the computer.
"...we dont care about the economics; we just want to be able to hack great stuff."
Here's the deal, me hearty: He's going to get his "Yes" to saving the $8 a month, after which he'll be treated to the live version of the opening animation from the Jetsons...
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I've been using ArcoIDE's hardware RAID (real hardware RAID! no software drivers!) for years, and my latest SFF PC machine has two 2.5" drives sitting in a 3.5" bay on top of their MicroRAID controller. Small, quiet, reliable ... this is a no brainer! The only drawback is that current affordable 2.5" drives run around 80-100 GB, so you can't do the 250 GB monster video setups. Personally 80 GB is plenty for me.
One simple rule for its versus it's
The clack lives on for specialty keyboard users: see the Matias Tactile Pro and the Unicomp Customizer.
The motor would speed up on the inner tracks, slow down on the outer tracks, and went through three levels of speed in between. The motor was nice and loud, so there was in effect a 5-note musical scale. There were rumors of people composing music for the floppy drives.
Reminds me of the first hard drive I ever used, on a Z-80 system. It was about the size of two PC's laying down, side-by-side. You flipped the big switch, and heard, rrr, rrrrr, rrrrrrr, rrrrrrr, as it ever-so-slowly started spinning up it's huge platters. Took a good few minutes to come up to speed. And I think it's capacity was around 5 Megabytes.
If I don't transfer 5 megabytes in a fraction of a second now, there's something wrong with the configuration of my system! Even my first PC-based hard drive was 20mb; incredible to note that 30-50mb per *second* are standard transfer rates.
Even with all the nostalgia, I use my pc's so much for personal and media purposes, that silence would definitely be a step in the right direction, though.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
"Why? Flash goes down in price per capacity linearly while HDD's go down in price per capacity nearly exponentially."
l
m l
Wrong!
This page charts the annual improvement of price per capacity of hard disks (amongst other things): http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/harddrives.htm
This page does the same thing for flash: http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/flashmemory.ht
Here is a key quote: "The improvement rate for flash for the last three years comes in at 109% a year whereas for hard disks over the same period the figure is only 35%."