Greater typical longevity: 3.5" or 2.5" HDD?

[GTaudiophile]

All things being equal, such as rotational speed, cache, and capacity, which form factor tends to have better longevity?

 

[GTaudiophile]

I should add that this for an external purpose.

 

[LOL_Wut_Axel]

This is from personal experience, but having dealt with more than five of each (for 2.5" drives all I've used is Seagate; for 3.5" Samsung and Western Digital; for 1.8" Toshiba) I can say that in general 2.5" Hard Drives are the most reliable, followed by 3.5" and with 1.8" at a very distant third.

This probably has to do with the 2.5" drives being engineered to cope with physical shock the best and them having a size that's small but not tiny. 3.5" drives fare worse, but only by a bit, because they're not as good when it comes to shock resistance. They also have a bigger size and weigh a lot more, which doesn't help when it comes to physics. 1.8" drives are too small to have any significant shock resistance at all; as a matter of fact, 4/5 of the 1.8" HDDs I've had in different portable media players have failed even though they weren't subjected to falls.

Just my experience, but for me: 2.5">3.5">1.8".

 

[hans007]

i dont have any stats or anything, but at a given rpm i would assume 2.5" drives would have less strain on the motor due to less rotational mass.

i mean 15k drives are 2.5". that said, i dont know if 3.5" drives have like heavier duty motors or something.

 

[greenhawk]

depends. Even if similar specs, the 3.5" should have a faster transfer speed, unless using USB2. If moving them around a lot, the 2.5" is going to outlive the 3.5" by (hopefully) a long time.

I've dropped several drives over the years, only one has died from it (3.5"). but that is not a large sample of course.

 

[C1]

2.5" HDDes will show much greater numbers in terms of the specification for the acceleration/shock level which they are able to sustain (vs 3.5"). I dont regard 3.5" HDDes as really intended to be fully portable. Even though they may have become hardier in certain ways, they also have become denser. For example, if you knock over a 2TB 3.5" HDD while it is running/accessing, then there is a good chance that it will sustain damage. 2.5" HDDes will be much less sensitive to this and WD's Scorpio HDDes even have protective shock sensing built in.

Western Digital 320GB Scorpio Black with Free Fall Sensor SATA 7200 RPM 2.5IN 16MB Cache
http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digita.../dp/B001FBJJQ4

2.5" HDDes should benefit also from less heating due to significant lower power consumption.