Question Who Uses 2.5" "Laptop" drives In Their Desktop (Besides Me)?

[BonzaiDuck]

Except for the fact that larger HDDs come in the 3.5" traditional size, I can find 2.5" drives of 1 and 2TB. Right now, I use one for media storage and another for my Macrium backup. Nobody told me I couldn't use those drives in a desktop. I've put them in an ICYDOCK ODD+2x-2.5"-hot-swap 5.25" bay device. I've been running them for almost five years now, without any problems. They serve their purpose in a lower tier of storage (5,400 rpm after all) with a large SATA SSD and two NVME drives.

Since they're cached to a small NVME and then to RAM, there's less stress and strain on them.

Does anyone else use these little drives in their desktop? If you think it's a bad idea -- you can say so. But it has been smooth sailing ever since I built my rig.

 

[Tech Junky]

The only instance this makes any sense is if you don't have an M2 slot for an NVME and still want an SSD for 8TB. Trade off is 600MB/s vs 3000MB/s. Both still faster than a spinner but 3-5X more expensive per TB.

Whether it's a good / bad idea doesn't really matter much since it's just your money. In the bigger Raid arena caching with an SSD is a thing and done often. Home / Prosumer though it's less prevalent.

In a R10 setup though with 4 drives you can hit over 400MB/s and 6 drives would be 600MB/s but the storage would be much bigger compared to the SSD / NVME counterparts. Just think you could do 18TB 3.5's for ~$400/ea vs $700 for SSD 8TB vs $1100 8TB NVME

Raid 1 18TB would cost the same as a single 8TB SSD
Raid 10 18TB (36TB array) same as R1 SSD 8TB / single NVME 8TB

Conceivably R10 18TBx3 / 600MB/s for the price of 2 NVME drives but nearly 7X the storage space. No need for a fancy controller or anything just the SATA ports and some MDADM magic in Linux.

If you want to you could even venture off the path further and use mSATA drives if it makes you happy though at lower capacities / speeds but, still doable. I put one in my car's MMI unit to replace a spinner awhile back and it works just fine with a HDD caddy/converter. For ~$50 it was a swap from spinner to SSD. It's a bit snappier but still limited by the old 133MB/IDE interface.

If you have a way of connecting something to something else or a way to make it work it works for you then do it. I can hook up NVME's to my phone or USB drives or a flash reader or just connect over the network to the NAS to pull data or back it up. Using the USB port though is the slowest option on the phone because it's for higher charging speeds rather than data moving.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

The only instance this makes any sense is if you don't have an M2 slot for an NVME and still want an SSD for 8TB. Trade off is 600MB/s vs 3000MB/s. Both still faster than a spinner but 3-5X more expensive per TB.

Whether it's a good / bad idea doesn't really matter much since it's just your money. In the bigger Raid arena caching with an SSD is a thing and done often. Home / Prosumer though it's less prevalent.

In a R10 setup though with 4 drives you can hit over 400MB/s and 6 drives would be 600MB/s but the storage would be much bigger compared to the SSD / NVME counterparts. Just think you could do 18TB 3.5's for ~$400/ea vs $700 for SSD 8TB vs $1100 8TB NVME

Raid 1 18TB would cost the same as a single 8TB SSD
Raid 10 18TB (36TB array) same as R1 SSD 8TB / single NVME 8TB

Conceivably R10 18TBx3 / 600MB/s for the price of 2 NVME drives but nearly 7X the storage space. No need for a fancy controller or anything just the SATA ports and some MDADM magic in Linux.

If you want to you could even venture off the path further and use mSATA drives if it makes you happy though at lower capacities / speeds but, still doable. I put one in my car's MMI unit to replace a spinner awhile back and it works just fine with a HDD caddy/converter. For ~$50 it was a swap from spinner to SSD. It's a bit snappier but still limited by the old 133MB/IDE interface.

If you have a way of connecting something to something else or a way to make it work it works for you then do it. I can hook up NVME's to my phone or USB drives or a flash reader or just connect over the network to the NAS to pull data or back it up. Using the USB port though is the slowest option on the phone because it's for higher charging speeds rather than data moving.

I have two-tiered caching with PrimoCache. I actually built the system with this in mind. I only needed a few TB of storage on the spinners, and those little drives are not expensive.

I've got gobs of free space on my 1TB boot-drive NVME, more gobs of free space on a 2TB SATA SSD, and then the two 2TB 2.5" spinners. Overall, there's nothing slow about anything. I'm happy with it. I have a 12TB drive-pool on a server, and it also has piles of free space. But I didn't build it with 2.5" drives. They're 3.5" 3TB Hitachi's.

 

[Golgatha]

I have a 1TB spinner for my Macrium Reflect backups in one of my desktops. This was a WD Black 1TB 7200rpm drive I took from my gaming laptop, which I replaced with a 2TB SSD. Basically I repurposed it instead of selling it, and it saved me from buying a regular 3.5in HDD for storage.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Hello @BonzaiDuck

it's the same as a desktop 3.5 HDD but in a smaller size, so both should have the same port in my case I'm using my Dell and hp laptop Hitachi, Seagate HDD in desktop computer the issue I'm facing is of drive speed as most of my drive are of 7200RPM but laptop HDD are of 5400RPM which slowdowns computer.

Only the newer motherboards with the correct slot on the motherboard will give you astonishing speed. An adapter will work but you will get ‘” only” standard SSD speeds. A mere 500 Mbps.

With my older processors and DDR4 RAM @ 3200, I was able to use the older technology of SATA HDDs for data and especially media which didn't require drive speed, and the caching makes up for it. Because Romex Primo-cache and this strategy had worked so well, I wasn't pressured to "keep up" with PCIE-4.0 or CPUs like Coffee Lake or newer.

In other words, my computer worked so much to my satisfaction that I might have missed useful upgrade opportunities. And if I didn't have the time to devote in upgrades or computer building, that was another factor.