Been finding some good deals on 2.5 disks lately, but have never bought one before. Have a couple of 3.5 disks on the other hand in my Unraid server. Wondering how much it matters wether I get a 2.5 or not? What form factor do you prefer/usually go for?
You’ll usually want 3.5" on anything that isn’t a laptop for the price and higher max speed
And theoretical reliability. Stuff breaks down quicker at smaller sizes says my lizard brain
Smaller stuff has smaller mass and therefore can be more reliable.
There were portable mp3 players with mechanical hard drives that were reliable despite extreme abuse.
Smaller stuff has to be more complex to get to the lower mass, which is usually what causes the biggest issues. The hdds in those ipods had some extra stuff to make them more reliable, but even then, move them too quickly and they show it.
Smaller doesn’t need to be more complex. 3.5" drives weren’t more complex than 5.25" drives.
A smaller head means a smaller drive actuator. Less mass and smaller size means it can compensate much quicker in response to vibration detection.
Back when full height 5.25" drives were the norm, you couldn’t pick up your PC while running without causing an error. Those tiny CF card sized drives failed but took extreme abuse compared to big drives.
I tell my wife 3.5" is more reliable but she’s not buying it :(
Except the mp3 players from Archos, which gave up after setting up. Twice.
Man my 6000 was immortal. Outlived 2 desktop drives and survived a car roll while in use. I was convinced they had made some blood pact with Nokia lol.
I got mine, moved some songs into it and an hour into listening the drive started clicking and the player was dead. Amazon replaced it and it was exactly the same. I forgot what model it was, but the discs were extremely fragile.
In general laptop drives were a gamble so it’s not shocking. I’m curious if I got a later batch or something or just got lucky.
That was one of those 1 and something inch tiny drives. They were crap
Oh man, I remember a Philips mp3 player I had for the longest time as a kid. You could hear the little clicks of the hard drive. Lost it on a hike, unfortunately.
I think 3.5" are usually priced better per tb than 2.5" drives and performance is usually better too. So unless you feel like burning money for an inferior solution, are have some space constraints that doesn’t allow 3.5" drives, I wouldn’t go with 2.5" drives. They’re more energy efficient though, but you’d need a fuckton of drives for that to make a worthwhile difference in your power bill.
The key here is “better performance at similar price points”. There are absolutely amazing 2.5 drives made for server applications, but they cost so much money you’re better off getting SSD these days.
Speaking of which, you should consider SSD.
Absolutely no shot I can afford 40 TB of SSDs for my NAS
That’s fair.
Depending upon your storage setup, may be able to make use of an SSD cache drive for a larger rotational drive array, though.
Ssd for boot but not cost effective for nas. Nor do I trust their longevity.
SSD longevity seems to be better than HDDs overall. The limiting factor is how many write cycles the SSD can handle, but in most cases the write endurance is so high that it’s unreachable by most home/NAS systems.
SSDs are however really bad for cold storage, as they will lose the charge stored in their cells if left unpowered too long. When the SSD is powered it will automatically refresh the cells in the background to ensure they don’t lose their charge.
Thanks, yeah i’ll go with 3.5" ones then, only reason i considered it was because of some really good deals. But I’d rather stick with having a uniform set of drives. Thanks for your input!
3.5" are cheaper, go up to higher capacities (2.5" maxes out at only 5TB IIRC), and are easier to find cheap in used/refurb formats.
I wouldn’t use 2.5" unless you absolutely had to for some reason.
The 2.5" drives are significantly more power efficient, often by a factor of 10. They also tend to be less noisy and produce less heat.
So in a small form factor NAS that isn’t under heavy load, 2.5” drives are usually the better option.
It looks like about 2-3W with 2.5" vs 6-8W with 3.5"
So 3.5" drives are going to be more efficient, since you can get one that’s 4x the capacity (20TB vs 5TB) for only a little over double the power usage.
Less noise is definitely a bonus if your NAS sits next to your workstation or something though.
Well first off, if you’re building a NAS, build it out of drives that are rated for NAS use. Seagate’s IronWolf line is a bit pricier than their BarraCuda but has better transfer speeds and (more importantly) better resiliency to vibration, which is important if you’re putting a half dozen drives in the same enclosure and don’t want them to fail prematurely.
2,5" drives are usually slower, but still about 5400rpm, which is on par with many NAS-specific 3,5" drives.
Also, you show Barracudas here, and I’d warn against them in a NAS environment. If you pick among Seagates, Ironwolf series might be what you need; otherwise, WD Reds reign supreme, just check that the specific drive you’re looking for uses CMR, not SMR.
Well you’re looking at it. 3.5in is faster
Depends on your NAS server. If you’re like me and using an old optiplex, you can fit WAY more 2.5" drives in it, and they’re pretty cheap. If you have an actual proper server chassis, then you probably want 3.5" NAS hard drives cuz warranty and all that.
I recently started getting my drives from serverpartdeals 3.5". The refrubs seem to work great for my use case of just media. I have a second unraid server that is just 2.5" ssd’s and 4 nvme’s that I use for my personal files and photos since it’s a much smaller and low power build I can stuff a bunch in a mini itx case so 2.5" is great for that
Seagate has the very well earned nickname of Seabrick.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters CF CloudFlare NAS Network-Attached Storage RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage SSD Solid State Drive mass storage ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity
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