3.5'' Vs. 2.5'' SAS HDDs: In Storage, Size Matters

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Diminutive 2.5” form factors are favored in the enterprise storage world for many reasons, but how do high-end 2.5” SAS drives compare to the established 3.5” products when it comes to performance and power? We requested some drives and did the analysis.

Benchmark Results: Throughput And Interface

Seeing 115 to 196 MB/s sequential read throughput is pretty impressive. The 2.5” Ultrastar C15K147 is actually faster than the 450GB 3.5” Ultrastar generation. Although SSDs provide higher peak and average transfer rates, hard drives are still more reliable when it comes to delivering consistent performance at certain levels.


Our Iometer streaming read test confirms that the latest 15,000 RPM 2.5” drive is as fast as the last generation in 3.5” model.

Interface performance reflects the peak bandwidth when reading from or writing into the drive’s cache memory.

Patrick Schmid and Achim Roos
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