Why not > 5TB internal HDD drives for laptops?

philb2

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
May 26, 2021
Messages
1,809
I don't know exact numbers, but "in the old days" when 3.5" desktop internal HDD capacity increased, so did 2.5" internal laptop HDD capacity.

I just checked the Egg, and there is only 1 5 TB drive, Seagate, and the only t TB drives are also Seagate. Nothing from WD or anyone else.

So I went over to the BB website. Laptop internals top out at 3 GB. Laptop externals that appear to be only one drive top out with a 10 TB WD model. So why doesn't WD release this 10 TB drive as an internal drive?
 
If it is not the technical challenge to fit that much plateau in that form factor, an almost near 0 demand for it would be my guess
I would agree, I think there are some minor technological challenges and the fact that there is virtually no demand makes those challenges not worth it.

Though, I thought i recall seeing 2TB 2.5in drives in the past b ut i could be mistaken
 
Yup no market. Cloud storage has been booming, backup is cheaper than ever, large external drives are plentiful. No real need to carry around 5+ Tb on data on a laptop. Sure if you do not have internet or a external drive there is a argument to be made. But I don’t think there is a market for spinning drives that big in laptops.
 
I don't know exact numbers, but "in the old days" when 3.5" desktop internal HDD capacity increased, so did 2.5" internal laptop HDD capacity.

I just checked the Egg, and there is only 1 5 TB drive, Seagate, and the only t TB drives are also Seagate. Nothing from WD or anyone else.

So I went over to the BB website. Laptop internals top out at 3 GB. Laptop externals that appear to be only one drive top out with a 10 TB WD model. So why doesn't WD release this 10 TB drive as an internal drive?
you have a link to that 10TB, I want to look at it
 
I'd sweat bullets thinking about how 5TB's worth of data is being mobile and can be lost/stolen. Backups are already hard enough for desktops...

I'd much, much rather my laptop be a thin client when dealing with data in the TBs, unless the data is inconsequential.
 
I get more 2.5" HDDs to do data recovery on than anything else. I got given a 4TB 2.5" the other day with 3.6TB of RAW video on. That was a long 3 days getting all that transferred about.

No! Just no!

Oh and the larger size 2.5" drives are well over 10mm thick.
 
In the first place, most laptops can't take thick (15mm) drives, so the limit isn't 5TB, it's 2TB. And you're better off with an SSD anyway.
 
Last edited:
In the first place, most laptops can't take thick (15mm) drives, so the limit isn't 5TB, it's 2TB. And you're better off with an SSD anyway.
Agree about the 15 mm drives and also about the SSD as the main drive for my laptop. However, I do a lot of photo editing, mostly on my desktop. When I am away from home, and I need to photo edit on my laptop, I have to use a clunky external (WD gamer?) 4 TB drive. Just try doing that in an airplane seat, where there is barely enough room to use a laptop and open up the screen.

I guess I really miss the days of laptop models with a second drive bay, like the old Lenovo Ultrabay.
 
I don't know exact numbers, but "in the old days" when 3.5" desktop internal HDD capacity increased, so did 2.5" internal laptop HDD capacity.

I just checked the Egg, and there is only 1 5 TB drive, Seagate, and the only t TB drives are also Seagate. Nothing from WD or anyone else.

So I went over to the BB website. Laptop internals top out at 3 GB. Laptop externals that appear to be only one drive top out with a 10 TB WD model. So why doesn't WD release this 10 TB drive as an internal drive?
First off any drive of spinning rust over 2tb is a 15mm drive most laptops do not support this size so there is near 0 demand you can get 4+ tb drives of the ssd variety but as you can imagine $$$ leaving us with 2tb 7mm drives as the biggest.
 
Agree about the 15 mm drives and also about the SSD as the main drive for my laptop. However, I do a lot of photo editing, mostly on my desktop. When I am away from home, and I need to photo edit on my laptop, I have to use a clunky external (WD gamer?) 4 TB drive. Just try doing that in an airplane seat, where there is barely enough room to use a laptop and open up the screen.

I guess I really miss the days of laptop models with a second drive bay, like the old Lenovo Ultrabay.
I guess it is more, do you really need to have that many TB of pictures on your laptop all the time? versus only keeping what you need when you need it?
 
I was impress that 2D picture needed during a travel was significantly above what would fit fully on 2 simple 256 gig USB key (but I know nothing about photoediting workflow).
 
Anymore, nobody wants anything but SSD. Could get expensive. Also, on the cheaper molasses non-SSD side, large 2.5" drives are few as well.
 
I guess it is more, do you really need to have that many TB of pictures on your laptop all the time? versus only keeping what you need when you need it?
Mostly no, but sometimes yes. And maybe "want" more than "need."

On my desktop, which is my primary photo editing station, it's no problem to throw in a 10 + TB drive.
 
Just try doing that in an airplane seat, where there is barely enough room to use a laptop and open up the screen.

I guess I really miss the days of laptop models with a second drive bay, like the old Lenovo Ultrabay.
I'd just say plan your work/trip better so you don't have to do that? Who is demanding you do that kind of work on a flight? Is it life critical? Do you need more than say 1TB of space to do that? Why do you need to carry around every photo and RAW file you've ever taken?

1300 RAW files for me takes up around 40GB so a 1TB external SSD should be around 25000 RAW images.

People really do make life difficult for themselves.
 
For those of you here still running 3.5" drives, you guys are really missing out. I can't remember the last time I bought a non 2.5" drive.
 
They make 16TB 2.5" SSD drives now sir.
For like $3500 per drive...
For those of you here still running 3.5" drives, you guys are really missing out. I can't remember the last time I bought a non 2.5" drive.
Missing out on what the increased cost? the limited options Seagate or Seagate or a western digital/hitachi? Most 2.5" fab has either been merged down to Seagate or wd or ended in favor of ssd. And $ for $ 3.5 is cheaper and faster and bigger than any 2.5 spinning drive available.

45-50 for a 2tb 3.5 drive 7200rpm
Vs
55-75 for a 2tb 5400 2.5 5400 rpm hmmmm which would you pick the slower smaller more expensive drive or the faster drive.

I'll add this I have 6 8tb wd red drives I bought for 170...
A 4tb 2.5" is 145
A 5tb 2.5" is 160
Link to standard sized 16TB affordable 2.5" drive please.
TEAMGROUP QX 15TB (15.3TB) 3D NAND QLC 2.5 Inch SATA III Internal Solid State Drive SSD (Read/Write Speed up to 560/480 MB/s) TBW 2,560TB Compatible with Laptop & PC Desktop T253X7153T0C101 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08SQLNHC8/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apan_glt_fabc_5CVJ8G69129NDGSMKD00

Only 3500$
 
Last edited:
As an Amazon Associate, HardForum may earn from qualifying purchases.
Lunas you dont need a 7200 RPM drive for editing photo's really, also platter density, the more dense, the faster.
 
I'd just say plan your work/trip better so you don't have to do that? Who is demanding you do that kind of work on a flight? Is it life critical? Do you need more than say 1TB of space to do that? Why do you need to carry around every photo and RAW file you've ever taken?

1300 RAW files for me takes up around 40GB so a 1TB external SSD should be around 25000 RAW images.

People really do make life difficult for themselves.
Speaking only for myself, it's not just a flight or set of flights. Sometimes I'm away for a month. I've been away as much as 3 months. It is what it is.
 
Speaking only for myself, it's not just a flight or set of flights. Sometimes I'm away for a month. I've been away as much as 3 months. It is what it is.

What's preventing cloud storage from working for you?
 
What's preventing cloud storage from working for you?
he could look into azure or Owncloud too. My end goal is to set up Owncloud and not use cloud storage so I can control my data.

Azure is really cheap for archive storage but if you need hot storage I think dropbox is cheaper and better.

Azure is like $1 per TB per month but its costs money to access it so if you need to access it more than once a year you need to switch to a different plan.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/storage/blobs/
 
I use Backblaze for backups, and the nice thing is that you can access all your backed-up files online, even browse through the various versions stored in the last 30 days.

2 birds with 1 stone.
 
Speaking only for myself, it's not just a flight or set of flights. Sometimes I'm away for a month. I've been away as much as 3 months. It is what it is.

Yeah making life difficult for yourself unfortunately. Still don't know why you'd need storage for 400,000+ RAW images on the go.

That's like the enture shutter count life for two Canon Pro DSLRs. If you are a pro photographer you'd only want to carry around the current project data, not masses of data from previous projects, as that's taking data out and about and exposing it to risk. HDDs are pretty fragile. You would be insane to carry loads of valuable but unnecessary data around. Stuff gets lost or stolen. Only take what you need.
 
Last edited:
Yeah making life difficult for yourself unfortunately. Still don't know why you'd need storage for 400,000+ RAW images on the go.

That's like the enture shutter count life for two Canon Pro DSLRs. If you are a pro photographer you'd only want to carry around the current project data, not masses of data from previous projects, as that's taking data out and about and exposing it to risk. HDDs are pretty fragile. You would be insane to carry loads of valuable but unnecessary data around. Stuff gets lost or stolen. Only take what you need.
Does he use teracopy? I would also hope he uses that if he is transferring the files back and forth a lot. The chance for bit flip is fairly high with transferring that many files/data.
 
If his needs are truly that high, I'd much rather pay extra for electricity and have my main editing machine always on, or at least Wake-On-Lan enabled, and then whenever I need to work, get a high quality internet connection, RDP into it and work away.

I'll be much, much happier about it, too. No need to worry about theft and such.

Heck, I'm already half way there with my lapdock and my Samsung S20FE with DeX. You get like 90% of the benefits of sitting right there at the desk at home.
 
Does he use teracopy? I would also hope he uses that if he is transferring the files back and forth a lot. The chance for bit flip is fairly high with transferring that many files/data.
Me, as the OP, I just use a folder sync utility to keep desktop and laptop folders the same. Data is copied over only once.
 
Laptop mechanical hdds stop at 2tb, most of the 3/4/5TB are 15mm, very few laptops can fit these drives, even sata is almost gone from laptops, most are on NVMEs now, but if you need the space there are even 8TB NVMEs if you got the money.
 
Laptop mechanical hdds stop at 2tb, most of the 3/4/5TB are 15mm, very few laptops can fit these drives, even sata is almost gone from laptops, most are on NVMEs now, but if you need the space there are even 8TB NVMEs if you got the money.
Yah. I have these leftover SATA 2.5" HDDs from old laptops, where I bought the cheapest config, then replaced the HDD with an SSD. Now I have no idea what I will do with these extra drives except place them in empty drive enclosures.
MFM, SCSI, IDE, SATA. The future is NMVe or maybe just chips that are soldered onto the motherboard, with who-knows-what pinout. I'm going to guess that the drive industry is going through hard times (no pun!) right now.
 
Yah. I have these leftover SATA 2.5" HDDs from old laptops, where I bought the cheapest config, then replaced the HDD with an SSD. Now I have no idea what I will do with these extra drives except place them in empty drive enclosures.
MFM, SCSI, IDE, SATA. The future is NMVe or maybe just chips that are soldered onto the motherboard, with who-knows-what pinout. I'm going to guess that the drive industry is going through hard times (no pun!) right now.
HAMR drives are alive and well and really needed but the problem is the time to fully read the drives. Mach.2 is so badly needed but what we really need like like Mach.4 where you have 2 actuators again and each has 2 independent heads for a 4x read rate. These future 50TB drives are going to take 1-2 days to read with a single actuator! With mach.2 it's still 12-24+ hours! If they brought back those 2 actuators' design drives and made each actuator have 2 independent arms we could have 6-12 hours to read the whole drive and throughput of 1-2GBps on a 50TB HMAR drive.

I would fucking love to have that!!!
 
I would point out that the read speed of the Seagate 4TB 2.5" drive I had in a few weeks ago, topped out at 80MBps and by the halfway point was a scorching 20-30MBps. This was with large video files...

If you want to live with that kind of speed for big data you need help.
 
Lunas you dont need a 7200 RPM drive for editing photo's really, also platter density, the more dense, the faster.
No for editing photos you need lots of ram and vram the reasons you would want read and write speed is if you needed to access multiple images in parallel it can eat lots of ram and with many layers more and more ram so yes raw space is more valuable than faster. But still photo editing is not the end all be all to her demand and in all around use.
And overall a hybrid approach is by far best. Nvme ssd with large spinning drive as either secondary or detached storage.
Example my laptop has 2x m.2 nvme slots and a 7mm sata bay I put a 500gb nvme 960 pro Samsung drive for boot a sabrent 2tb nvme drive for steam games and a 2tb firecuda sshd my previous laptop actually had the option to have a single 15mm drive or 2 7mm I used to have 2 2tb and a 500gb now I'm doing same space but 500gb boot 2tb steam 2tb sshd storage
 
Back
Top