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

Benchmark Results: Temperature, Power, And Efficiency

Surface temperatures are lowest on the new 600GB 3.5” drive, probably because it's capable of dissipating heat most efficiently over its entire surface. The predecessor was the hottest product in this analysis, and the 2.5” drive rests in the middle. We assumed that the 2.5” drive would win the temperature test, although ultimately the differences don’t matter much. All of these drives require active cooling.

The 2.5” drive only requires one-third of the power consumed by the 3.5” drives. This is extremely important in server environments, where hundreds of drives can be required for top performance, capacity, and redundancy.

Shifting to a sustained HD video stream doesn't change 3.5” drives' power consumption much. They're already at a pretty high level. The 2.5” drive still requires less than half the power for this task.

Power efficiency is best on the 2.5” drive because it blends speed (while not being the fastest) with only half the power of the 3.5” drives.

Lastly, there's workstation I/O performance per watt. The 2.5” drive is even better in this test since the power required to deliver peak I/O performance is much lower than on the 3.5” drives.