SSD and 2 ½ inch Drives

Solid State Drives or SSDs offer a significant performance boost over conventional mechanical hard drives or HDDs. Having said that, drive performance is not necessarily a big consideration in small systems as there are other potential bottlenecks, such as network and processor performance. SSDs are expensive compared to HDDs, probably too expensive for general purpose storage in most instances. However, there may be some merit in using a small SSD for the C: drive that holds the operating system.

Most file servers use 3 ½ inch HDDs as these offer the highest capacities and best price-performance among disk drives. Smaller 2 ½ inch drives (“laptop drives”) can be an alternative in some scenarios: they use less power, are quieter and more reliable due to reduced vibration levels. The disadvantages of 2 ½ inch drives is that they are not available in such high capacities and are more expensive. Also, they may need to be mounted in caddies to make them fit into the drive bays on the server.

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