I am going to buy two external hard drives to use as a cheap alternative to a tape drive. Each will be used on alternate weeks, and will be transported 40 miles by car to be stored at an off-site location when not being used.
I’m wondering whether I would be better off buying an enclosure based around a 2.5" drive or a 3.5" drive, if durability/reliability is a consideration. I’m worried about the effects of bumping and jarring during the weekly trip.
2.5" drives are intended for use in laptops, and thus I assume are engineered to take more abuse than desktop (3.5") drives. On the other hand, they’re smaller and therefore have much closer tolerances than 3.5" drives, which would make me assume they’re more fragile.
So, what’s the Straight Dope on this? If the difference in size is the only factor (not manufacturer, cost, etc.), which drive would you pick to last the longest in the situation I described?
Laptop drives are generally considered more durable. They are smaller, lighter, and easier to protect. They can usually be powered by the USB/1394 port and so are easier to use. They are also about twice the cost per GB of 3.5", and only available to 100 GB right now.
With prudence you will probably not see a difference in reliability, and if you do damage one the 3.5" will be cheaper to replace. OTOH, if money isn’t an issue and 100 GB is enough to do the job you will probably like the 2.5" more. I use 3.5" enclosures at home and work for general offline storage, but have several 2.5" drives for transferring data back and forth.
It’s the motion of the ocean, not the size of the ship. Size doesn’t matter.
Whut?
Oh, sorry.
Carry on.
Unless you plan to shake, rattle and roll that portable hard drive, size really doesn’t matter.
I’ve been carrying a 2.5 inch external hard drive in my back pocket for the last 6 months. No data loss or any other sort of reliability problems so far (I even dropped it once with no ill effect).
These 2.5 inch notebook disks are designed to be carried around as part of a notebook computer (where as a 3.5 inch disk is not).