this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2024
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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?

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[–] [email protected] 62 points 5 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 5 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 5 months ago (3 children)

Absolutely no shot I can afford 40 TB of SSDs for my NAS

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Man, I remember when Zip Disks were a big deal and a GB was a lot of storage.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

One of my clients referred to Zip disks a few days ago. That really sent me back. Only my rich friends had Jaz drives, whereas the rest of us were still using Zip disks and optical media. Those early USB thumb drives at USB 1.0 speeds were also painfully slow.

My portable storage journey progressed from 5.25” floppy disks, 3.5” diskettes, Zip disk, CD-R/RW, DVD-R/RW, 2.5”/3.5” external HDDs and now portable NVME SSDs.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

I remember learning that 3.5" disks were still called "floppy" disks, despite being rigid plastic. My teacher took apart a disk and showed us how the inside was a film, but all that did was encourage us to take apart the disks and make desk toys out of the springs.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

No LS-120 or eSATA drives. :-)

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago

That’s fair.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

Depending upon your storage setup, may be able to make use of an SSD cache drive for a larger rotational drive array, though.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Ssd for boot but not cost effective for nas. Nor do I trust their longevity.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

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!