Does the form factor between 3.5" and 2.5" matter in a NAS server?

Sunny' 🌻@slrpnk.net to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 170 points –

Been finding some good deals on 2.5 disks lately, but have never bought one before. Have a couple of 3.5 disks on the other hand in my Unraid server. Wondering how much it matters wether I get a 2.5 or not? What form factor do you prefer/usually go for?

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Absolutely no shot I can afford 40 TB of SSDs for my NAS

Man, I remember when Zip Disks were a big deal and a GB was a lot of storage.

One of my clients referred to Zip disks a few days ago. That really sent me back. Only my rich friends had Jaz drives, whereas the rest of us were still using Zip disks and optical media. Those early USB thumb drives at USB 1.0 speeds were also painfully slow.

My portable storage journey progressed from 5.25” floppy disks, 3.5” diskettes, Zip disk, CD-R/RW, DVD-R/RW, 2.5”/3.5” external HDDs and now portable NVME SSDs.

I remember learning that 3.5" disks were still called "floppy" disks, despite being rigid plastic. My teacher took apart a disk and showed us how the inside was a film, but all that did was encourage us to take apart the disks and make desk toys out of the springs.

Depending upon your storage setup, may be able to make use of an SSD cache drive for a larger rotational drive array, though.