Now that there's mSATA, can we get 3.5" SSDs for our desktops?

[lubey]

So far all SSDs have been 'one size fits all' at 2.5". Now that they are doing some mSATA thing for the notebook people, surely they can scrap the 2.5" and just make them the full 3.5" size. I know its not quite like magnetic storage where you can just make a bigger platter to get more space, but surely instead of going to smaller and smaller manufacturing sizes of the tracks, they can just make the whole thing bigger at a lower memory density and hopefully then its cheaper and/or more storage. I mean, the space is going unused anyway so they might as well fill it out and not make everyone use a 2.5" adapter...

Fair enough if that logic is incorrect, but just wanted to voice my opinion.

 

[Emerald]

why would they create a 3.5" drive when 2.5" drives work for both laptops and desktops. They would have to invest into new machines, manufacturing and warehouse space.

Financially your idea does not make seance for the manufactures

 

[IntelEnthusiast]

You know I asked the question as to why they don't do 3.5" drives some time ago and I was told that going up to the 3.5" yielded nothing as far as capacity and just raised the manufacturing cost from the extra material. With a lot of servers using 2.5” drives I think that the days of 3.5” drives will come to an end in the not too distant future (these are my own views and not Intel’s®).

Christian Wood
Intel Enthusiast Team

 

[lubey]

Yeah, there would definitely be setup costs which would be passed on to the consumer at first, although hopefully you could use most of the same machines and just scale up the size of each PCB and get less yield per big die. I guess because so many servers use 2.5", desktops might be too small a market to justify the setup costs though.

Of course the concept would only be beneficial in the long run if the larger size yielded more capacity, so its a shame it doesn't. Thanks for the responses guys.

 

[Pyree]

There are 3.5 inch (search vertex 2 3.5) SSD but they make no sense. 3.5 for HDD because they have faster access time but for SSD, 2.5 or 3.5 makes no difference. Just make them 2.5 because it is easier (1 size fit (almost) all).