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."

Nice but...

[stecoop]

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.

Mac mini?

[ronanbear]

2.5" drives are considerably more expensive. If there was a large demand for quieter drives it would make more sense to use quieter 3.5" drives.

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.

Re:Nice but...

[thebdj]

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.

Why?

[slashbob22]

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.

Sorry for the quick rant.

[SphericalCrusher]

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.

You mean, like a Mac Mini?

[dpbsmith]

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?

Nostalgia for the Sounds of the Early Computer Age

[Alzheimers]

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.

I'll wait for "Solid State".

[blcamp]

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.

Re:quiet home computers

[jedidiah]

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.

Old news

[nessus42]

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.

Quiet and Low Power? Just Buy a Laptop Already

[InitZero]

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

Re:Ok...

[Dare nMc]

....Why?

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.

Re:Costs are good - awesome SRAID opportunity :)

[pla]

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".

Re:I'll wait for "Solid State".

[Gat0r30y]

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.

Re:Nostalgia for the Sounds of the Early Computer

[shdragon]

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.

Re:Nostalgia for the Sounds of the Early Computer

[PhotoGuy]

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.