When will 2.5" replace 3.5"?

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Spazturtle

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When do you think 3.5" HDDs will die off? When will 2.5" become the standard?
 
It's going to be years due to all of the equipment including NAS etc that are offered as 3.5 only. Even a lot of the faster 2.5s come with 3.5 adapters.
 
Just wondering what sort of hotswap bays I should get for my new rig. I have 2 5.25" bays and 2 3.5" bays.

I can fit 6 2.5" hdds in one 5.25" bay or 3 3.5''s in 2 5.25" bays

I can also fit 4 2.5"s in the 2 3.5" bays.
 
Size...

platter size that is, with 2.5 just hitting 1.2T at 10k..... they have some time to go.

Now you could argue you can fit more drives into a case, but that is also more drives that could die or cause issues, not to mention the heat that those 1.2T drives let off!

we just got,a Dell 720xd with 16 1.2T 10k drives and man with out the AC on that box gets hot around the drives!
 
MrGuvernment said:
Size...

platter size that is, with 2.5 just hitting 1.2T at 10k..... they have some time to go.

Now you could argue you can fit more drives into a case, but that is also more drives that could die or cause issues, not to mention the heat that those 1.2T drives let off!

we just got,a Dell 720xd with 16 1.2T 10k drives and man with out the AC on that box gets hot around the drives!
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This.
I believe he was spot on with size versus capacity and the increased failure chance of a higher quantity of lower capacity drives.
 
Unless and until someone magically manages to fit as much data in a 2.5" form factor as they can fit in a 3.5" form factor (which is to say, probably never, since if you can do it in a 2.5" drive, then logically you could do significantly more of it in a 3.5" drive), I'd suspect never.

Really, were I a betting man, I'd say some completely new technology in data storage will come along and change the game before 3.5" disappears, and it will be the cause of its loss and possibly of 2.5" loss as well, if the new technology doesn't happen to properly fit in either of those form factors.
 
Already has for me. I don't ever plan on getting a 3.5 ever again.

For business and servers... A while to say the least.
That said, I know companies who aren't even that big that use apparently SSD servers.
 
Spazturtle said:
When do you think 3.5" HDDs will die off? When will 2.5" become the standard?
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When the data density gets high enough that you can produce drives with enough capacity to meet the demand.
It may not happen for 20+ years if demand for large capacity drives (relative to the current time frame) doesnt slow.

At the moment, no matter how large a drive is made, there is a decent demand for even larger.
Also consider that a 2.5" drive will fit in the space for a 3.5" drive, but not the other way round.
Case manufacturers will have to take this into account.
They could provide a mount tray for 2x 2.5" drives to fit into a 3.5" drive bay.
You dont want to pack many more in as airflow is required.
 
When do you think 3.5" HDDs will die off? When will 2.5" become the standard?
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I believe never. They both will be replaced by some type of solid state device (not flash based) in a few decades.
 
I don't know if you've noticed, but 2.5s are already available in 900GB and 1TB sizes in Western Digital Velociraptors, for example. They are a pretty fast drive for a datacenter mechanical drive. For home, I think that's plenty of space for most people, but there are also 2TB laptop drives already in 2.5s.
 
I'd say that 2.5" drives are already the standard. Most people don't need the space that a 3.5" has. Besides, many people buying computers today are getting laptops so they have no choice. A lot of servers have migrated to 2.5" SAS drives.

I don't think 3.5" will die anytime soon since there's always going to be a need for massive storage capacities.
 
jimh425 said:
I don't know if you've noticed, but 2.5s are already available in 900GB and 1TB sizes in Western Digital Velociraptors, for example. They are a pretty fast drive for a datacenter mechanical drive. For home, I think that's plenty of space for most people, but there are also 2TB laptop drives already in 2.5s.
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We've noticed. There are also 4, and now 6 TB 3.5" drives, and 10 TB on the horizon. :)

The datacenter has more cash than you do at home - they're actually driving reasonably quickly (which is to say, it will still be many years before they're all there) towards placing SSD's closer to the client (in the servers), with spinning disks behind them or farther away (remote SAN/NAS/object storage offerings), offering larger capacity, cheaper storage.

My prediction that 3.5" isn't going anywhere does not mean I don't predict 2.5" will sputter out or not make a good showing of itself. I think many use-cases you today expect a 3.5" will turn into a 2.5".

I do wonder about at home - at this point, the average home may not be there, but the average GEEK's home (who I kind of look to as the "bleeding edge" of home users, and where other home users eventually get to) is easily into the 2-10 TB range of available space these days. That's, for the moment, far cheaper to achieve on 3.5" than 2.5" on a per GB basis -- and price nearly always is the #1 consideration of home users.
 
I am only going to buy 2.5" drives from now on. You can fit two 2.5" drives in the space of one 3.5" drive.
 
We had a big project last year to replace all mechanical drives in our production servers with SSD.
Either outright swap, or replace the machine if it was end of life, with a new server with SSD.

The only thing mechanical drives now are client blade machines and client desktops...laptops are all SSD as well.

(not sure what the SAN is running, but Id guess there is some SSD in there already)
 
D-EJ915 said:
they took up too much space and areal density got to the point where they weren't necessary. also the smaller diameter of the newer disks made higher RPM possible
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I think the RPM thing was actually a big part of it. Programs needed faster access times and the big 5.25" drives just weren't practical. Those big drives operated in the 3000-4000 RPM range. So obviously the access times could be an issue.

Now that being said it would be interesting to see the speed difference of 4000 RPM at the end of a 5.25" platter versus 7200 RPM at the end of a 2.5" platter assuming the same areal density.

I think it would be cool to see some "media" type hard drives come out in this form factor. They would not be optimal for out right performance, but for the minimal bandwidth requirements of media you could get some substantial storage. Consider that going from 2.5" to 3.5" to 5.25" is just slightly doubling surface area in each step. So for the same areal density technology you would get

2.5" = 2TB
3.5" = 4TB
5.25" = 8TB

But 8TB is pretty close to putting "all your eggs in one basket" :) and there is some caution to that.


The power difference between 2.5" & 3.5" is substantial.

From Western Digital Spec Sheets for "Green" drives.

3.5" Drive
  • Current Requirements 12 VDC (Peak) 1.78 A (21 Watts)
  • Read/Write 6.00 Watts
  • Idle 5.50 Watts
  • Standby 0.80 Watts
  • Sleep 0.80 Watts

2.5" Drive
  • Current Requirements 5 VDC (Peak) 1.00 Amps (5 Watts)
  • Read/Write 1.7 Watts
  • Idle 0.8 Watts
  • Standby/Sleep 0.2 Watts
 
Keep in mind that one of the main reasons why 2.5 gained such prevalence in enterprise is because

more disks = more IOPS

with overall storage being only a trivial secondary factor.

2.5" spinner HDDs have been largely replaced by SSDs, but 3.5" will stay until they come out with super high density SSDs/flash similar media.

But that will not be before full consumer adoption of SATA 4 and SAS 3
 
I think 2.5" hard drives will end up being replaced soon by SSDs entirely, as companies like Seagate seem to have little interest in pushing capacities on 2.5" drives. SSDs, on the other hand, are rapidly getting cheaper and larger and will eclipse 2.5" HDDs in the next few years. Seagate hasn't released an update for the Constellation.2 line for nearly THREE years and from what I heard, don't plan an update until the end of NEXT year!! This is an eternity in the HDD world and in the same time span, SSDs have come down massively in price and increased greatly in capacity, now nearly to the point of approaching parity. In fact the 840 EVO 1TB is a similar price to the Seagate Savvio 10k.7 1.2 TB drive. The EVO isn't enterprise grade, but you can see where it's heading. The lower power consumption and high reliability in high drive count racks makes SSDs a near surefire lock to completely replace 2.5" magnetic drives. 3.5" magnetic drives have the edge in density and cost for the time being, but the 2.5" magnetic HDDs days are numbered, with my guess being to less than 5 years of rapidly decreasing relevance.
 
daro2096 said:
1tb 2.5" drives are now available. Toshiba have one for £49.99(mileage may vary).
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What kind of argument is that ? 4TB 3.5" drives are available. You need to use four 1TB 9.5mm 2.5" drives or two 2TB 12.5mm 2.5" drives to achieve same thing as with one 4TB 3.5" drive. And it will occupy the same or more space than the 3.5" drive.
 
faugusztin said:
What kind of argument is that ? 4TB 3.5" drives are available. You need to use four 1TB 9.5mm 2.5" drives or two 2TB 12.5mm 2.5" drives to achieve same thing as with one 4TB 3.5" drive. And it will occupy the same or more space than the 3.5" drive.
Click to expand...

I don't need 4tb of space. That would be overkill.
 
D-EJ915 said:
they took up too much space and areal density got to the point where they weren't necessary. also the smaller diameter of the newer disks made higher RPM possible
Click to expand...

At the time I'd say it was entirely the speed that killed 5,25" HDDs off. I only saw one in my time, long after 3,5" were common, in the cheap computer a friend bought (featuring an AMD K6 II 350MHz), that thing was slow as hell, noisy, and huge, weighing a ton ! If the form factor had survived until now then it would maybe still have a chance where storage is more important than speed. I'm guessing the problems they had at the time would still exist though, for example a bigger disk will dilate more with heat, it will need more power, experience more g forces needing to be stronger, etc.
 
Spazturtle said:
Why did 5.25" HDDs die off then?
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Because for a non-tower case desktop system, a 3.5" drive saves space. Not everyone (unlike us) uses tower cases. A lot of "ordinary people" use desktop systems with a horizontal case arrangement.

Of course, if you want to go back a bit, 5.25" hard drives were developed to fit into a case mounting that originally held a 5.25" floppy drive. And before there were 5.25" floppy drives, there were 8" drives. And thus the first low-cost "Winchester" drives that appeared around 1980 were 8" form factor. And all of 5 or 10 MB. :) But as 5.25" floppy drives replaced 8" floppy drives, so did the equivalent hard drives.
 
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