Am currently running a 4-year old Buffalo NAS drive. Everything is backed up on external USB drives, but I still feel like I am living on borrowed time, and need to make a decision on a new NAS pretty soon.
It appears I have waited long enough that both QNAP and Synology are now shipping products with 2.5" drives. Also, was recently told by a storage guru at work that in a couple of years, everything will be 2.5" form factor.
While I like that 2.5" means smaller, lower power, quieter, lower vibration (longer reliability), it also appears that 2.5" drives are more expensive and slower. So, like with all choices, there are tradeoffs.
Am curious if anyone else has decided to be a 2.5" early adopter, and if so, what has your experience been? Right now, the QNAP SS-839 Pro has caught my eye. Of course, tomorrow there will be 7 new models to look at....
. Are we still at the stage where 3.5" is considered "proven" technology, and 2.5" is relatively risky (at least here in the shallow end of the pool with consumer-grade SATA II 5400rpm drives)?
Thanks!
Hook
Posted on: 27 October 2011 by garyi
I am not aware of any benefits of laptop drives in place of desktop drives.
Certainly pound for gig the 3.5in drives a far cheaper. I would get a nas dealing with them.
Posted on: 27 October 2011 by DavidDever
SSD storage drives are typically 2.5" - I suspect that this is actually forward thinking on their part.
Posted on: 30 October 2011 by trickydickie
+1 for 3.5in drives, higher capacity for the same money.
We run a small IT business and we rarely have to replace hard drives in desktops/servers but laptop drives seem more prone to failure. This may be down to other factors, like shock damage or poorer cooling but I can't see the need to put these in NAS drives at the moment.
Posted on: 30 October 2011 by Simon-in-Suffolk
Hi I only currently use 3.5" drives in my NAS but I' do pay the extra to get manufacturer balanced drives. (kind of like balancing your tyres on your car). These are fairly essential if being used in a multidisk NAS as they won't vibrate against each other, and because of the lower mechanical stresses the quoted MTBF increases and noise decreases.
Simon
Posted on: 30 October 2011 by DaveBk
I use 3.5" Enterprise class RE4 1Tb drives from Western Digital. I must admit I never really thought about 2.5" vs 3.5" as I was just looking for relatively fast enterprise grade storage, the form factor was never a consideration.
Posted on: 31 October 2011 by roo
3.5" drives have doubled in price over the last week do you may want to use your existing nas for a little longer
