July 25, 201114 yr Hi there, I've lurked for a while, but I'm only starting to post now. I'm going to be building an unraid server soon, and I've found an enclosure with 9 2.5" drive bays. It's small and sleek so I'm tempted to pick it up. I know the 2.5" drives don't perform as well, and I know they are way more expensive per GB. Both the Samsung M8 1TB and WD Blue 1TB squeeze a TB into the 9.5mm form factor. They use way less power, and from a noise perspective, I think they're pretty similar to the green 3.5" drives. I'm just curious if anyone has given it a shot - i'm leaning in this direction... Priorities for me are low noise and low power and low heat. Thanks!
July 25, 201114 yr I could only see the issue being cost / performance. Although they are supposed to be tough, I wonder how tough they are to be running in a 24x7 arrangement. I know supermicro has special enclosures to install 8 2.5" drives in a 2 3.5" drive slots. So somewhere in the industry this is happening in server environments.
July 25, 201114 yr Yes, it can be done. and it could be quite the sight to see.. and in quite a small footprint. The answer is price per gig and few gigs per drives in a product that has an upper drive quantity limit of 20 drives. the 1TB 2.5" drives are hovering around $105 while in the 3.5" world, you are seeing the 3TB drive just hit that mark. those are of course both "sale prices".. that brings us to.. catching the current sales: 2.5" array max = $2,205 for 20tb 3.5" array max = $2,247 for 60tb I think that is the deciding answer. on a sickening side note.. lets assume you have deep pockets, you can get sata600 sandforce 120gig SSD's for about $180 right now on sale... hrmm.. 21 of those = $3780 for a 2.4TB array that would be so fast, if you sneezed, you would miss the parity check... not to mention, to small to use.. in a few years a full or partial SSD array might be a viable solution. for now, it is a dream. for enterprise class SAS drives: If you went 2.5" SAS drives, the largest i believe is the 450gb 10k drives for about $400 and the 500gb 7.2k drive for $200. we wont look at the 15k drives.. we buy the 15k 450gb drives by the truckload for work and pay a lot more for the OEM ones in the drive sleds already. some of our production sans boxes cost more then a sports car. Remember the 1TB laptop drive and SAS drives are a bit "thicker" I know supermicro has special enclosures to install 8 2.5" drives in a 2 3.5" drive slots. So somewhere in the industry this is happening in server environments. Yes, all over the industry. The industry standard is SAS drives. they are a 2.5" form factor. they are a bit thicker then laptop drives and are much faster with high torque motors and spin at 10k or 15k.. little beasts... with a price tag to put them out of the consumers hands. EDIT: I should mention I have been very seriously thinking about putting a 3 Drive unraid server in my living room that is portable so i can take with me when I have business trips. Keeping just my newest of the new movies on it. I was looking at an atom build with 3 laptop drives in a case just barely bigger then the mITX board and 3 drives sitting on top of it. Right now I have an MSI nettop that holds 2x 3.5" 2TB drives running win2k8. I wanted to go smaller and lighter for travel. I might just go mac mini server in the end.
July 25, 201114 yr ^ This sums it up pretty well, but it comes down to your needs. If maximizing your space is your biggest concern, then the clear choice is 3.5" drives. If minimizing your footprint is the biggest concern, then perhaps 2.5" drives are the way to go.
July 25, 201114 yr I've been playing around with an SSD server and I've had no problems to speak of. I do expect the SSDs to wear out a bit faster than HDDs would, but that just comes with the territory. 90 mb/s writes to the parity protected array is nice...the 120 GB array capacity, not so much If I do start offering the SSD server design, I will likely do so with 2.5" HDDs at first. The price is about double per GB, but for some people the smaller footprint, lower noise levels, and lower heat levels are worthwhile.
July 25, 201114 yr 11 drives in an HP Micro Server! 6x 2.5", 5x 3.5" (max 21TB) : http://forums.overclockers.com.au/showpost.php?p=13228154&postcount=678
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