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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."
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.
There is no need. You can find 7200 RPM laptop drives. Just be prepared to pay even more then the 5400 drives and wait for a bit more heat. Desktop drives in laptops makes no sense. The goal has always been to improve power consumption, size/space, and heat. This is something that desktop drives don't necessarily have to strive for as they have nearly "limitless" power available, much more space available, and better heat dissipation, largely because of the extra space, but also the availability of coolers.
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
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.
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.
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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 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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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".
People have been saying this for years, yet it never seems to happen. Why? Flash goes down in price per capacity linearly while HDD's go down in price per capacity nearly exponentially. Sure a GB of Flash is going to be dirt cheap in a couple of years, but your going to want 500 GB in 2.5 in. And a HDD is still going to be a hell of a lot cheaper than flash.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
They still exist and make them - even name brand companies like Dell, HP, Gateway, and Alienware.
Ever seen what some folks will brign to a LAN party?
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos