The 2.5" vs. 3.5" RAID Challenge

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3.5" Western Digital Caviar RE WD1600SD

We picked a set of decent SATA drives to compare to the 2.5" Fujitsu drives. These RAID edition drives are validated for professional applications running 24/7, and thus feature a MTBF of one million hours.

Equipped with 8 MB cache and running at 7,200 RPM, the 3.5" WD drives will obviously be faster than the 2.5" Fujitsus at their slower 5,400 RPM. The seek time provided by WD (8.9 ms) underscores our point about performance. Western Digital's RAID edition is based on a 80 GB per platter design; while this is no longer state of the art, it is likely a tradeoff one must accept for continuous operation.

As mentioned before, the 3.5" WD drives consume four times as much energy as the 2.5" drives by Fujitsu. When running in idle mode, energy consumption of the WD drive is a whopping ten times higher. Also, there is a huge difference in weight: the WD drive has six times the mass of the 2.5" Fujitsu.

Patrick Schmid
2 Comments Comment from the forums
  • If you look closely you will see that this review compared 5400rpm 2.5" drives with 7200rpm 3.5" drives.

    Which makes it completely useless and flawed. I seriously can't believe Tom's did that. Maybe if there had been 5400rpm 3.5" drives included, some useful information could be gleaned from the tests.

    This entire article should be deleted just to save face, if not disk space. This article's very existence makes me embarrassed for Tom's Hardware.
    Reply
  • Agree
    This is ridiculous
    the outside speed of the platter !!
    I cannot believe it .. you wait one turn never mind where your data are located and at 7200rpm your platter may be 1 meter in diameter it is not going to change anything it will stl be one rouind trip
    You will wait one turn ( 1/7200th of a second )
    It ain't go faster nor slower mechanically
    The heads are another story

    Reply