For or against: 2.5" drives

[Hawkeye4077]

So I am about to start piecing together the rest of my General Purpose Server/NAS and I see a significant growth in 2.5" Drives. WD is even marketing some Red 2TB drives now. For a 8drive system would this offer significant heat/power/noise savings over going with 3.5" drives? Granted there looks to be a $75 premium on those 2.5" drives, but in Alaska, I might can make that up in a couple of years in power savings.

Speed is really not a priority. My 4x750gb WD Sata II greens can run 100mb/s writes in Raid 5 which is more than sufficient. My file output at most would be needing a sustained 30-40mb/s read to support a couple of 1080P quality streams to XBMC powered HTPCs.

System is:
Supermicro H8SGL
AMD Opteron 6128
8gb Corsair XMS3-1333
HighPoint RocketRaid 2720
Raid 5:4x WD 750GB Green
Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard
Fractal Define R4

[NEOAethyr]

I'm pretty sure 2.5 inch drives only use the 5v rails.
You would have to compare the amp ratings of the drives in question.

In theory with a perfect set of brackets you could fit up to double the drives in the same encloser.
MAYBE save a few watts, or maybe not :shrug:.

I would just go with the 3.5 inch reds myself.
Just be warned, it seems the quality control is non existent these days except perhaps the retail ver's.
I just got a 2tb retail red for my brother's future computer, cost quite a bit more, but it checked out 100% ok.

I found out if you buy oem, and end up having to rma it, you'll get a used refurbished drive :\.
That scared me into buying the retail, though I'm unsure of the rma practices of them :|.
(I buy a new drive, I would expect a new drive...)

[NKrader]

3.5

You wouldn't gain much if anything by having 2.5..

[Zaxx]

(I buy a new drive, I would expect a new drive...)


+1 amen...lol

[WangChung]

You could use 2.5" drives no problem. I'm using some right now in my server just as random disks. If you really want to be fancy you can get something like this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817998144
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41DsRd%2B0UlL.jpg