2.5" vs. 3.5" HDDs - Reliability

[thomas-hn]

Do you all use 3.5" harddrives in your setups or does someone have experience about the reliability of 2.5"harddrives?
When having a look into the specification of WD there are 5 years warranty for 3.5" drives, while only 2 years for the 2.5" drives. However, in a lot of discussion all over the Internet many people state that the 2.5" drives are more reliable because they are built for mobile devices.

Has someone here experiences with 2.5" drives over some years?

 

[Heracles]

When having a look into the specification of WD

I will just never touch WD drives... They sold SMR drives without telling people that they were SMRs and it created a lot of trouble to a lot of people. It was bad to the the point that even IXSystems themselves had to stop selling their own gear with WD drives for a while.

A little after that, they changed some key components in another of their drive with a significant impact on performance, again without warning their customers.

the 2.5" drives are more reliable because they are built for mobile devices

I would strongly disagree with that one. Drives designed for mobile are meant to achieve things that are completely different compared to a NAS drive :
--When a sector is hard to read, it will fight it all it can to retrieve it because if it fail, the data is lost.
A NAS drive will give up quickly, returning an error. TrueNAS will compensate with data from the other drives and then will try to fix that sector.

--Laptop and their components are not meant to run 24/7
A NAS is.

--Laptop drives are not meant to be used next to many others. As such, they are not exposed to their vibration and other side effet
NAS drives are.

Now, note that there are some 2.5 drives that are meant for server / enterprise use. As such, there are 2.5 drives that are perfectly fine for NAS. They are just not the same as the ones for laptops.

 

[Jailer]

I don't think there's enough people using 2.5 inch drives in a NAS on this forum to provide a meaningful answer.

 

[Arwen]

Be very clear, the 2.5" HDD with larger capacity are generally SMR. Not suitable for use with ZFS under most conditions. So having to use 4-10 x 2.5" drives that are not SMR, for the same capacity as a 3.5" drive is not computer space or money efficient.

That said, data center 2.5" HDDs can allow some odd things. For example, when you need 8 to 12 Mirrored vDevs, but of limited size, they can be a better choice.


All that said, I use a 2TB 2.5" laptop HDD in my home media server, with ZFS on Linux. It generally works fine. I am guessing it's SMR, but I don't care at this point. (I bought it 4 or 5 years ago).

 

[Ericloewe]

I got stuck with a few Toshiba 2TB 2.5" SMR disks. After ~2 years they're starting to fail. They're also terrible when it comes to load cycles.

 

[Etorix]

2.5" SSD are now available in larger capacities than non-SMR 2.5" hard drives… That should put the issue to rest.