Comments on: 3.5″ drives: the end is near

By: stewart

stewart — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 18:46:16 +0000

Also the HP MSA 70 enclosure supports (25) 2.5″ SAS drives

http://h18006.www1.hp.com/storage/disk_storage/msa_diskarrays/drive_enclosures/msa70/index.html

By: Duncan

Duncan — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 13:48:33 +0000

I tend to agree with Wes, I can’t see everyone moving wholesale to 2.5″ drives, the 3.5″ SAS/SATA drive market for hosting esp in low-mid range servers like suns x21xx & x22xx ranges and most other ranges use 3.5″. I will however I’m sure eat my words in a few years..

sent from: fav.or.it [FID2443618]

By: Joe Kraska

Joe Kraska — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 14:34:57 +0000

I think the cost thing will turn pretty quickly, … by pretty quickly, I’m thinking 2010 time frame, about the time SSD’s start to hit the high end disks very hard in price and price-performance.

As for the other poster’s comment regarding Atrato, they are using very cool laptop class drives to begin with. Given what I know about their heat data, I’ve wondered if their internal cooling architecture wasn’t overengineered. Still: cool product (pun intended).

Joe.

By: Wes Felter

Wes Felter — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 18:53:43 +0000

I don’t see any mention of cost. Here’s an example:

3.5″ 1.5TB drive: $190
3x 2.5″ 500GB drives: $450

Ouch. It looks to me like the consumer and cloud markets will remain 3.5″ for the foreseeable future.

By: Pete Steege

Pete Steege — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 17:04:20 +0000

Yes, it does looks like the end is near for 3.5″. I’ve posted on this a couple of times: http://tinyurl.com/4bjokn
http://tinyurl.com/4fev5w
http://tinyurl.com/4rytw8
We’re talking years vs. months, so no worries today. But best get ready now.

By: Martin G

Martin G — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 13:27:28 +0000

Well I’ve decided for all my own personal builds that all my internal drives will be 2.5″ drives in future.

However, talking to a storage reseller; they are having some interesting problems with some of the high density 2.5″ drive based arrays due to heat and increased failure rates. Cooling is going to be important and believe or not, I’m being also asked to consider looking at acoustic hoods to protect the hearing of the DC engineers.

By: Steven Schwartz

Steven Schwartz — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 22:12:25 +0000

I think it will be interesting to see the Enterprise uptake on the 2.5 inch drives, there has to be more compelling arguments then purely size as you have said. In the end I really think the ability to cool these drives will become the biggest factor for companies like Xiotech. As you reported before, Atrato with a similar “fail in place” methodology to XIOtech (but I must point out that is appears that XIOtech now has some very fancy in system healing of failed drives) is already using 2.5inch drives.

They(Atrato) seem to be doing something right if they can cram in all those drives and still maintain proper cooling. (something Nexsan clearly over engineered fans to resolve if you’ve ever heard one of those bad”Beasts” running).