2.5" to 3.5" HDD hotswap cradle adapter?

[SaltyCoffee]

Just wanted to check here real quick, I can't find anything appropriate anywhere for a long time now so hope is not high. But......

I was wondering if anyone can recommend or has even heard of an adapter that would allow the use of 2.5" SATA HDDs in 3.5" hot swap cradles?

I'm flummoxed that seemingly such a thing doesn't exist, because why wouldn't you want the option? I'm currently using 5TB drives which for whatever reason only come in 2.5" FF, and exclusively from Seagate. And any of the commonly found carriage adapters put the drive in the center, which is only useful if you're simply trying to secure the drive inside a computer case. Considerably less useful when needing to line up the SATA and power connectors to an enclosure's interface.

Thanks for any info!

 

[Davvo]

Can you give the seagate drive model number/product line name?
If you don't find anything you can just manually make holes in the standard adapters to match the correct position, or even 3D printing your own if you have the hardware.
Or, switching to a (I presume) more apt HDD line for your nas. iirc 2.5'' drives might be smr.

 

[danb35]

I've used these for quite a while:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00F3QFKNS

I've used them for SATA SSDs rather than spinners, but they still locate the drive just fine to mate with power/data on the backplane.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

We used these with good results:

2.5" SSD & SATA Hard Drive to Desktop 3.5" SATA Bay Converter Mounting Kit

Compatible with any 2.5" SATA hard drive or SSD Compatible with backplane trays such as those found in Apple Mac Pro silver tower models Fully SATA 3.0 Revision (6Gb/s) compatible and backward compatible with SATA 2.0 Revision (3Gb/s) and 1.0 Revision (1.5Gb/s) drives Open design allows for full...

sabrent.com

 

[SaltyCoffee]

Can you give the seagate drive model number/product line name?
If you don't find anything you can just manually make holes in the standard adapters to match the correct position, or even 3D printing your own if you have the hardware.
Or, switching to a (I presume) more apt HDD line for your nas. iirc 2.5'' drives might be smr.

Yes you're not wrong. I'm using 2.5" for ya know.. reasons. Link

I've used these for quite a while:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00F3QFKNS

I've used them for SATA SSDs rather than spinners, but they still locate the drive just fine to mate with power/data on the backplane.

Brilliant! I have no idea how this eluded me for this long but you are a credit to this forum! Thank you

 

[SaltyCoffee]

We used these with good results:

2.5" SSD & SATA Hard Drive to Desktop 3.5" SATA Bay Converter Mounting Kit

Compatible with any 2.5" SATA hard drive or SSD Compatible with backplane trays such as those found in Apple Mac Pro silver tower models Fully SATA 3.0 Revision (6Gb/s) compatible and backward compatible with SATA 2.0 Revision (3Gb/s) and 1.0 Revision (1.5Gb/s) drives Open design allows for full...

sabrent.com

Thank you sir. Apparently my search game is not what I thought it was. It's embarrassing how long I've been looking for this.

 

[Davvo]

Yes you're not wrong. I'm using 2.5" for ya know.. reasons. Link

I mean, they have a practical use in frequent spinned up and down systems. I remembedered some kind of SMR line, so that was my fear.

 

[NugentS]

My google-fu would inidcate that those drives are in fact SMR drives.

 

[Davvo]

My google-fu would inidcate that those drives are in fact SMR drives.

Yup, confirmed. @SaltyCoffee hope you frequently backup your data.

 

[SaltyCoffee]

Yup, confirmed. @SaltyCoffee hope you frequently backup your data.

I do in fact. I've had to recover from critical failures in the past so the strategy I'm using has been battle tested, although I wasn't using Barracudas then. I remember hearing something about SMR a while back. Remind me what the issue is? I didn't know these drives were using SMR, apparently the whole Barracuda line is. I picked them because they are the largest 2.5" drive on the market (I guess we know why now).

 

[NugentS]

I think all 2.5" drives are SMR these days (queue someone pointing out one that isn't)

I think it all blew up here: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/202...smr-disks-arent-great-but-theyre-not-garbage/
or maybe: https://www.servethehome.com/wd-red-smr-vs-cmr-tested-avoid-red-smr/

The WD Reds are considered the worst. Others vary

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

I think all 2.5" drives are SMR these days (queue someone pointing out one that isn't)

I can picture some 15k enterprise thingies that might be still available as new but also have ridiculously low capacity by today's standards. Like 140 or 280 G or so ...

 

[SaltyCoffee]

I can only speak to the ones in my NAS, a year in they've been rock solid. Capacity's at 60% so I'll probably be upgrading before it matters anyway.

 

[winnielinnie]

I think all 2.5" drives are SMR these days (queue someone pointing out one that isn't)

Sure, but what about 1-inch drives? I might pop a few of these suckers into my new NAS for a RAIDZ2 pool.

* Yes, these are real.

 

[Davvo]

I can only speak to the ones in my NAS, a year in they've been rock solid. Capacity's at 60% so I'll probably be upgrading before it matters anyway.

SMR drives work until they suddently don't. Really can't stress the importance of using CMR drives enough, even WD ammited that SMR can't go with ZFS.

I think all 2.5" drives are SMR these days (queue someone pointing out one that isn't)

IIRC, some 1TB drives are CMR.

 

[NugentS]

See I knew someone would

 

[NugentS]

I can picture some 15k enterprise thingies that might be still available as new but also have ridiculously low capacity by today's standards. Like 140 or 280 G or so ...

I don't consider those as hards disk drives these days. More a waste of raw materials. SSD's are almost certainly cheaper and better in every respect

 

[Ericloewe]

Hey, Dell, HPE and Lenovo need to be able to sell something that's cheaper on paper than a 1 TB SSD. Or what, you think they should just sell disks at not-insane prices? What do you think is underwriting their servers' prices? Okay, maybe not HPE, their quotes are so insane my head would explode if I asked them to quote a 96-core server...

 

[Ericloewe]

Sure, but what about 1-inch drives? I might pop a few of these suckers into my new NAS for a RAIDZ2 pool.

* Yes, these are real.

Oh, I can one-up that ridiculousness. Dell actually manufactured a version of the R630 for 1.8" disks, because some lunatic clearly wanted it. These things, naturally, are rare as hell. I can't imagine a rational benefit to this monstrosity, absent a boatload of 1.8" disks that fell off the back of a truck in Shenzhen, or some such thing.

 

[winnielinnie]

I can't imagine a rational benefit

So "cuteness factor" doesn't hold any value...?

Maybe they were trying to break into this market: