2.5" Laptop Spinner in a Desktop Build? What to expect?

[BonzaiDuck]

I've almost completed building a simple system to replace my brother's LGA-775 system. When it's a matter of another member of the fam-damn-ily, the configuration and testing puts reliability at the forefront. Otherwise, I'll likely waste more time in the future doing more than Remote Desktop maintenance.

The system is a budget-level Z77 board and i5 3570K/8GB-RAM, otherwise made of surplus or recycled parts. I'm using a 256GB 840 EVO as the boot drive, and a 320GB WD Blue is currently installed for additional storage. I'm planning to cache the HDD with a surplus 60GB SSD -- confident that the result will be fast and reliable.

The case is an 8-year-old CM Centurion midtower, to which I've made minimal mods to increase front-panel airflow. For that reason, there's only a single 5.25" bay available -- for anything. The WD Blue is installed in the upper 3.5" cage "floppy" slot -- only place it will fit and allow installation of a full-length GTX 570 gfx card. But I'd like to use that slot for a USB3 adapter presenting two ports on the front-panel.

AND -- I ALSO have a spare 2.5" WD Blue laptop drive, for which I see no immediate use, except for this project. I could do either of two things: put the 2.5" drive in the lower slot facing the graphics card, where it's length will not interfere with the latter, or install it in the upper slot TOGETHER with the USB3 ports (less likely to fit with the 3.5" full-size HDD.)

I've seen a lot of opinions about using a laptop drive in a desktop configuration -- several of which were mildly discouraging. This desktop will likely spend more hours per day asleep or in hibernation than in fully-powered use -- similar to what one would expect with a laptop. The caching is likely to eliminate any sluggishness one might expect with such a laptop drive. It is also likely to reduce the wear and tear on the laptop drive.

WHY would this be a problem over time? What were the problems using a 2.5" 5400rpm laptop drive for desktop use? I've seen hot-swap devices for such drives and just for that purpose . . .

UPDATE: Well . . . poking around the web, I see that there is a profound sense that there is no problem with using a laptop HDD in a desktop. Apparently the only trouble is the adapter needed for earlier IDE lappie-drives, and of course -- the speed. But I have that problem licked . . . too . . .

Still, any observations/comments vastly appreciated. I'm going ahead with the prep required, as I type these last words.

 

[R0H1T]

WHY would this be a problem over time?

What were the problems using a 2.5" 5400rpm laptop drive for desktop use?

I've seen hot-swap devices for such drives and just for that purpose . . .

I don't see why it would be.

Slow, certainly as compared to the 7200 rpm desktop hard drives, but things aren't as bad now with SSHD as an alternative & the fact that the highest density HDD is a 2.5" Toshiba drive, minus SMR tech IIRC.
Also WD green drives & Seagate 5900 rpm drives are just as bad if not worse, the laptop drives should be more reliable & a tad cooler IMO.

Seems like you're probably going to use Primocache again, if you are why don't you increase the system RAM as well? IT probably has more of an impact than an SSD even on a SATA 3.0 system where the SSD read/write speeds will always be limited, depending on the SSD of course.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I don't see why it would be.

Slow, certainly as compared to the 7200 rpm desktop hard drives, but things aren't as bad now with SSHD as an alternative & the fact that the highest density HDD is a 2.5" Toshiba drive, minus SMR tech IIRC.
Also WD green drives & Seagate 5900 rpm drives are just as bad if not worse, the laptop drives should be more reliable & a tad cooler IMO.

Seems like you're probably going to use Primocache again, if you are why don't you increase the system RAM as well? IT probably has more of an impact than an SSD even on a SATA 3.0 system where the SSD read/write speeds will always be limited, depending on the SSD of course.

Ah! I'm glad for your comment, which I discovered just after appending a few words to the original post.

Yes -- I concur with your opinion, which was the "second opinion" I was seeking. This will be the "third seat" in my 3-PC Primo license. I've had nothing but stellar operation with Primo for both an existing laptop (with SSD) and a desktop. You are correct about the RAM, but my experiments with the laptop with 8GB RAM and a (barely) SATA-II interface showed me what 3GB RAM will do under those limitations. But that was RAM-caching (which Primo does equally well as compared to my current desktop SSD-caching usage). A $40 SSD should do as nicely for this machine as a similar SSD is currently doing for the gaming box I built last fall.

I also find that I really love klooging together old parts for the better!:biggrin:

JUst an afterthought, probably evident in other posts I've made over the last couple weeks. Bro uses his computer mostly for serious bidnis and his ITunes, yet he is a serious game-addict. But he is absolutely averse to PC gaming. In that respect, everything revolves around his PS3. I thought maybe I'd put a game on this desktop to show him what these newer processors will do. (It's not even an early Haswell! But Ivy Bridge seems impressive, now that I've had a chance to fiddle with one!)

 

[dbcooper1]

I've done this before and it works fine. Dell used laptop drives as the only drive in USFF desktops for some time. They were slow as an O/S drive but as a data drive, I'd guess the cache is not going to make a noticeable performance difference and add a potential bit of complexity, especially for remote support.

 

[chubbyfatazn]

Don't see why there'd be an issue, and I doubt you'd notice (in actual usage) any difference between your 2.5" 5400rpm drive and a regular 3.5" 5400rpm drive. FWIW I've been using a spare 2.5" 160GB WD Blue as a boot drive in an older HTPC for years without issue.

I think you're overthinking this. And that includes the PC itself - if your bro knows next to nothing about computers, I'd drop the hassle of setting up the cache drive. I'd probably even make the 60GB SSD the boot drive and keep the 840 Evo for myself :sneaky: He'd probably notice an immediate difference coming from LGA775 and be thrilled, and that's not even considering the SSD (I'm assuming the 570 is a "new" addition).

If there's anything I've learned from being "that computer guy" in the family, it's to keep things as simple as possible, both for my and their sake. Because inevitably some time in the future someone's gonna come back to me with a slow, busted-to-hell installation, and when I ask them "Did you use xyz program that you wanted me to install?" they'll tell me "No, I couldn't figure out what to do past the intro screen." And then at that point I'll just decide to put it out of its misery and reinstall Windows.

 

[rchunter]

I'd use a 2.5" drive in a desktop computer no problem. If you have it use it.

I've got a 2.5" WD black 750GB 7200rpm that I use as a cache drive in my unraid server. I average about 110mb/sec when copying to it over the network. So not all laptop drives are super slow.

 

[pitz]

No problem whatsoever, although it would be quite tragic to build a machine with a powerful CPU and still use a HDD for its boot drive.

I personally like those little dual 2.5" to 3.5" hot-swap units you can buy off of Newegg/etc. I have a Venus brand one myself, and it provides LEDs on the front of the case for drive usage.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

No problem whatsoever, although it would be quite tragic to build a machine with a powerful CPU and still use a HDD for its boot drive.

I personally like those little dual 2.5" to 3.5" hot-swap units you can buy off of Newegg/etc. I have a Venus brand one myself, and it provides LEDs on the front of the case for drive usage.

Oh, don't worry! The boot-system disk is a 256GB 840 EVO. [Of course, I'm now looking at Samsung's "fix" for these -- I've got two in operation now including the one on this system -- but I haven't noticed any "performance decline."]

Last I looked, the OS and essential installs like the AV/Security and a few programs was consuming about 40 GB. I might have used a 500GB for it, but I think I planned this all along: I picked up a 60GB SSD for about $40, and the leftover, 2.5" WD Blue laptop drive has only a few hours on the odometer. I've added this combination and the third-leg of my Primo-Cache license to cache the HDD, and it's working perfectly. In this scenario, the slower speed of the 2.5" Blue drive won't matter in overall performance.

Bro had a 2x 500GB [WD Black] RAID0 and about 1TB of storage -- of which he's currently only using 20% after 4 years. And much of that is in media files which are also stored and duplicated on our server. I suspect he'll have plenty of space and plenty of speed or the perception of it with this system.

And just as an afterthought to report, I've prepped and initialized that lappie drive and set up the cache for it.

This . . . is gonna be . . . good. Very good.

Let me thank all of you for your insights about this. I also might have had misgivings about the "Primo-complication" as someone suggested, but with good hardware, it should be a "set-it-and-forget-it" situation. Especially if the cache is set up to work only for reading the cached data with direct writes to the Blue drive, it shouldn't require much maintenance or provoke any worries about excessive maintenance in the future. And if I take the Prom-Cache icon off the desktop, there shouldn't be any mishaps brought on by a "curiosity factor."

If anything, it will mean less wear and tear on the little Blue drive, plus 80% read-rate performance of an SATA-III SSD. Even if the "caching gimmick" is going out of style, I've done enough with the various caching formulas that my misgivings are few.