Laptop drives and real world performance

[Beans]

Hi all,

(Edit: looks like i posted this in the wrong section, forgive me.)

I have the opportunity to get a set of very very inexpensive 500gb 2.5" drives, however, i'm slightly concerned how much it will play it to giving me issues if i did use them. Maybe i'm just over thinking it.

My scenario and setup:

- Home Server, not very high access
- They would be softraid 0
- They are WD Blue Scorpio's 5400 RPM 8MB Cache
- Primary use my freenas for General file backup, pictures. streaming movies, music ect. In UFS

I'm currently using 2x 500gb Samsung 'Green' 5400rpm drives that work fantastic for what i need.

So think i'll be fine?

 

[jgreco]

A primary concern with a drive is whether or not it is rated for 24/7 use; drives that are rated for "laptop use" might not be. Unfortunately, manufacturers are sometimes cagey about this kind of thing. How big a set of drives? Just a pair?

 

[Beans]

4 of them, at about ~30$ a TB

 

[Beans]

4 of them, at about ~30$ a TB

The more i think about it the less i like of it... For a few dollars more i can have brand new drives of my choice and not have to chance anything. Oh well.

 

[jgreco]

Well, if you put them into a ZFS RAIDZ2, then you could lose one or even two drives due to failure and still be okay. It'd give you 1TB of usable space.

From a performance point of view, it is hard to know for sure. In general, a 2.5" drive can be quicker than a similarly-rated 3.5" drive, the heads have less space to cover, but then again if it was designed for notebook use, then low power is usually a major consideration. I've seen laptop drives run as poorly as maybe a dozen megabytes a second read/write, which would definitely be something you'd notice performance-wise, but the Scorpios appear to be within the realm of reasonable. A random review rates them at over 100MB/sec read/write sequential. They'll cost you less in electricity.

 

[CAlbertson]

Hi all,

I have the opportunity to get a set of very very inexpensive 500gb 2.5" drives,...

The advantage of laptop drives is that they use very little power. They would be perfect for a small NAS that is used only to store backup data so the drives could spend most of their time powered down, not spinning