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."

7200 spin 2.5 inch drives

[the computer guy nex]

"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

Already happening

[skinfitz]

Some Dell SX series desktop machines already use 2.5" drives.

Re:Show off your hook, guys!

[HaloZero]

And this one on the next page doesn't?

http://xyzcomputing.com/images/stories/articlepics /seagate_momentus543/m54003_01.jpg [xyzcomputing.com].

I'd say that's pretty telling.

So...

[Jasin Natael]

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.

This is going to happen

[Chanc_Gorkon]

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.

Get Perpendicular!

[Anonymous Coward]

You knew it was coming!

"This high capacity is made possible by perpendicular recording, a technology which records data on the hard drive perpendicularly instead of longitudinally,"

http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/recording_h ead/pr/PerpendicularAnimation.html [hitachigst.com]

Re:So...

[ivan256]

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.

Re:So...

[Jasin Natael]

Average seek of 3.6ms, sustained data rate of 93.3MB/sec... All in a nice little 2.5" package.

Umm... Maybe you misread that. It's over an inch tall, and 4"x5.7", according to its spec sheet [hitachigst.com]. That would make it, by necessity, a 3.5" form-factor hard disk. It is nice, though. Now I just have to get a machine that can use SAS drives well, and save up a lot of money. I've got a 15kRPM Fujitsu hard disk around here somewhere that a customer gave me, but I never got around to shelling out the money for a Ultra320 controller so I could use it. C'est la vie.

Re:You mean, like a Mac Mini?

[Lussarn]

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.

Re:Costs are good - awesome SRAID opportunity :)

[ilovegeorgebush]

SRAID is the abbreviation for Software Rapid Array of Inexpensive Discs. It's the ability to use several discs to define a filesystem. There are numerous levels to RAID, some of which increase disc performance, while others increase the chance of keeping data if something bad were to happen to the disc(s).
There are two forms - Software and Hardware RAID. Software RAID is configured by the operating system, whereas Hardware RAID is a standalone piece of hardware that holds the discs and provides configuration utilities on the box itself.
You can read up on RAID (Software and Hardware) over at Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]

Re:Mac mini?

[bobschneider8]

It's already easy to get a slightly larger Mac Mini with a 3.5" drive, by using one of the external HD cases that are designed to sit under the Mac Mini. Here's the one I use:

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ministack/ [macsales.com]

This case plus a 250GB 7200 3.5" PATA drive cost me $170, less than a 2.5" 120GB drive. And I got USB and Firewire hubs built in as well.

I used to put them in high end servers, too

[spun]

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. [rocksclusters.org]

Luggable

[LunaticTippy]

They used to call those Luggable computers. My friend's dad had a kaypro or northstar CP/M computer. You could pick it up and take it anywhere, plug it in and go.

Of course now you don't have a 30 pound beast with a 5 inch screen. But it is the exact same concept.

Re:Quiet and Low Power? Just Buy a Laptop Already

[stud9920]

Most people who do have $1200 at hand for a decent laptop prefer to keep it on their savings accounts for less futile things. Therefore, leaping from laptop to laptop to upgrade is pretty painful.

Meanwhile, a desktop can be upgraded in $100 increments. None of these increments are particularly painful. No need to replace a display until it breaks (rare) or becomes obsolete (rare). Same for keyboard, mouse, and arguably HDD.

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.hitachigst.com/tech/techlib.nsf/techdoc s/9F13D129F76896D08625701500774BD2/$file/Viper_SAS _Specv1.4.pdf [hitachigst.com]

Seems to disagree with you. There are no 15,000 RPM 2.5" drives, and only a couple of 10K 2.5" drives on the market right now

Wrong

[matt21811]

"Why? Flash goes down in price per capacity linearly while HDD's go down in price per capacity nearly exponentially."

Wrong!

This page charts the annual improvement of price per capacity of hard disks (amongst other things): http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/harddrives.html [mattscomputertrends.com]

This page does the same thing for flash: http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/flashmemory.htm l [mattscomputertrends.com]

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%."