Robin Harris talks about capacity growth in 2.5″ notebook drives, and wonders what it portends for the enterprise. No doubt that 1 TB ‘mobile’ drives, available from Seagate later this quarter, are interesting. But the enterprise is affected in a way not discussed by StorageMojo.
He’s absolutely right that the enterprise is moving to 2.5″ SAS and SATA. But the 2.5″ notebook device world has little to do with it, other than general learning curve efficiencies in the factory.
That’s because unlike the 3.5″ form factor, 2.5″ ‘mobile’ drives have very little to do with enterprise drives. Even the width of the drives are different. This has lead to a new-to-the-world class of 2.5″ 7200 rpm enterprise drives, since notebook drives won’t ever have what it takes to support enterprise. These new drives come in SAS or SATA (which says a lot, given the idealogical differences between the SAS and SATA disk drive contingents), currently up to 500GB.
It’s rare these days to see a totally new animal in the disk drive world. Seagate’s version is called Constellation. It’s the (till now) missing link for the 2.5″ enterprise form factor to go “all the way”.
Check it out.
Pete, lots of folks said that the enterprise would never use “consumer” drives – but they are in wide use today. I suspect that 2.5″ notebook drives will see a similar adoption once the form factor is widely accepted by enterprise customers.
Robin
Could happen I guess. Two things are different this time around:
1. OEMs have tried and thus far mostly failed in using 2.5″ notebook-class drives for the enterprise.
2. There is an enterprise-ready 2.5″ 7200 rpm drive ready to go for this market. Early on, there was no enterprise-class 3.5″ 7200 rpm drive, so desktop-class drives were brought in. Today most serious 7200 rpm enterprise applications use enterprise versions of that class of drive.
[...] The sweet spot for SMBs is a sweet combination of both. Perhaps high performance servers with 2.5-inch 10K drives (Savvio) , and bulk storage using 2.5-inch 7200RPM drives (Constellation). [...]