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?

  • Granixo@feddit.cl
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    5 months ago

    You’ll usually want 3.5" on anything that isn’t a laptop for the price and higher max speed

      • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Smaller stuff has smaller mass and therefore can be more reliable.

        There were portable mp3 players with mechanical hard drives that were reliable despite extreme abuse.

        • Addv4@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          Smaller stuff has to be more complex to get to the lower mass, which is usually what causes the biggest issues. The hdds in those ipods had some extra stuff to make them more reliable, but even then, move them too quickly and they show it.

          • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            Smaller doesn’t need to be more complex. 3.5" drives weren’t more complex than 5.25" drives.

            A smaller head means a smaller drive actuator. Less mass and smaller size means it can compensate much quicker in response to vibration detection.

            Back when full height 5.25" drives were the norm, you couldn’t pick up your PC while running without causing an error. Those tiny CF card sized drives failed but took extreme abuse compared to big drives.

          • yggstyle@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            Man my 6000 was immortal. Outlived 2 desktop drives and survived a car roll while in use. I was convinced they had made some blood pact with Nokia lol.

            • RamblingPanda@lemmynsfw.com
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              5 months ago

              I got mine, moved some songs into it and an hour into listening the drive started clicking and the player was dead. Amazon replaced it and it was exactly the same. I forgot what model it was, but the discs were extremely fragile.

              • yggstyle@lemmy.world
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                5 months ago

                In general laptop drives were a gamble so it’s not shocking. I’m curious if I got a later batch or something or just got lucky.

        • OminousOrange@lemmy.ca
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          5 months ago

          Oh man, I remember a Philips mp3 player I had for the longest time as a kid. You could hear the little clicks of the hard drive. Lost it on a hike, unfortunately.

  • Grippler@feddit.dk
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    5 months ago

    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.

    • vzq@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      5 months ago

      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.

          • skittlebrau@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            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.

            • themeatbridge@lemmy.world
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              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.

        • tal@lemmy.today
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          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.

        • FrederikNJS@lemm.ee
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          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.

    • Sunny' 🌻@slrpnk.netOP
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      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!

  • computergeek125@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Probably best to go with something in the 3.5" line, unless you’re going enterprise 2.5" (which are entirely different birds than consumer drives)

    Whatever you get for your NAS, make sure it’s CMR and not SMR. SMR drives do not perform well in NAS arrays.

    Many years ago I for some low cost 2.5" Barracuda for my servers only to find out years after I bought them that they were SMR and that may have been a contributing factor to them not being as fast as I expected.

    TLDR: Read the datasheet

    • Solar Bear@slrpnk.net
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      5 months ago

      Whatever you get for your NAS, make sure it’s CMR and not SMR. SMR drives do not perform well in NAS arrays.

      I just want to follow this up and stress how important it is. This isn’t “oh, it kinda sucks but you can tolerate it” territory. It’s actually unusable after a certain point. I inherited a Synology NAS at my current job which is used for backup storage, and my job was to figure out why it wasn’t working anymore. After investigation, I found out the guy before me populated it with cheapo SMR drives, and after a certain point they just become literally unusable due to the ripple effect of rewrites inherent to shingled drives. I tried to format the array of five 6TB drives and start fresh, and it told me it would take 30 days to run whatever “optimization” process it performs after a format. After leaving it running for several days, I realized it wasn’t joking. During this period, I was getting around 1MB/s throughput to the system.

      Do not buy SMR drives for any parity RAID usage, ever. It is fundamentally incompatible with how parity RAID (RAID5/6, ZFS RAID-Z, etc) writes across multiple disks. SMR should only be used for write-once situations, and ideally only for cold storage.

  • MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    5 months ago

    3.5" are cheaper, go up to higher capacities (2.5" maxes out at only 5TB IIRC), and are easier to find cheap in used/refurb formats.

    I wouldn’t use 2.5" unless you absolutely had to for some reason.

    • poVoq@slrpnk.net
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      5 months ago

      The 2.5" drives are significantly more power efficient, often by a factor of 10. They also tend to be less noisy and produce less heat.

      So in a small form factor NAS that isn’t under heavy load, 2.5” drives are usually the better option.

      • MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        5 months ago

        It looks like about 2-3W with 2.5" vs 6-8W with 3.5"

        So 3.5" drives are going to be more efficient, since you can get one that’s 4x the capacity (20TB vs 5TB) for only a little over double the power usage.

        Less noise is definitely a bonus if your NAS sits next to your workstation or something though.

        • poVoq@slrpnk.net
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          5 months ago

          It is true that if you need a lot of space at some point 3.5" are going to be more efficient per GB, but usually people don’t need hundreds of terabyte storage in a home NAS.

          For normal applications in a home NAS that mostly sits idle, 2.5" drives run at about 1W and most are design to be able to be powered by normal USB, meaning 2.5W max.

          3.5" drives on the other hand are usually designed for datacenter use, where power efficiency is a low priority and they usually take 5-10W in normal operation and and easily 15W when spinning up.

          • MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            5 months ago

            I don’t even have all that much storage (18TB usable), the other side of things is I’d need 8x 5TB 2.5" drives in RAID 10 to be equal my 2x 18TB 3.5" drive mirror I have now, which means I’d need to add an HBA card that also consumes more power. Even if I ran RAIDz2 I’d still need 6 drives.

            Price is another factor, from some poking around 2.5" is around 2x the cost of what I paid for my 3.5" drives.

  • AVincentInSpace@pawb.social
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    5 months ago

    Well first off, if you’re building a NAS, build it out of drives that are rated for NAS use. Seagate’s IronWolf line is a bit pricier than their BarraCuda but has better transfer speeds and (more importantly) better resiliency to vibration, which is important if you’re putting a half dozen drives in the same enclosure and don’t want them to fail prematurely.

  • Allero@lemmy.today
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    5 months ago

    2,5" drives are usually slower, but still about 5400rpm, which is on par with many NAS-specific 3,5" drives.

    Also, you show Barracudas here, and I’d warn against them in a NAS environment. If you pick among Seagates, Ironwolf series might be what you need; otherwise, WD Reds reign supreme, just check that the specific drive you’re looking for uses CMR, not SMR.

    • Sunny' 🌻@slrpnk.netOP
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      5 months ago

      lol - just realised that probably wasnt the best formulation for a question ahah

  • variants@possumpat.io
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    5 months ago

    I recently started getting my drives from serverpartdeals 3.5". The refrubs seem to work great for my use case of just media. I have a second unraid server that is just 2.5" ssd’s and 4 nvme’s that I use for my personal files and photos since it’s a much smaller and low power build I can stuff a bunch in a mini itx case so 2.5" is great for that

  • Charadon@lemmy.sdf.org
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    5 months ago

    Depends on your NAS server. If you’re like me and using an old optiplex, you can fit WAY more 2.5" drives in it, and they’re pretty cheap. If you have an actual proper server chassis, then you probably want 3.5" NAS hard drives cuz warranty and all that.

  • Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyzB
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    5 months ago

    Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

    Fewer Letters More Letters
    CF CloudFlare
    NAS Network-Attached Storage
    RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage
    SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage
    SSD Solid State Drive mass storage
    ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity

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