Re: [OFFTOPIC] Mass storage prices and form factor

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> One cloud storage provider, Backblaze, regularly publishes reports on
> harddisk reliability (they obviously have a lot of data on that :-)

All of them seem to be 3½" as well.
Interesting.

It actually looks like the 2½" HDD market has been abandoned: 5 years
ago, the largest HDD were 5TB for 2½" and 10TB for 3½".

Since then, it seems like nothing new happened in the 2½" space, whereas
the 3½" drives kept growing (tho only about 15% per year).

Based on what I've heard, I suspect that to be competitive in the
datacenter, 2½" drives would need to offer about half the capacity of
3½" drives (of course, that also presumes manufacturers going through
the trouble of producing CMR drives in 2½" form factor).

OTOH for an end user who doesn't need more than 8TB of disk space, 2½"
drives can often be a better option (assuming you have enough SATA
ports).


        Stefan