I couldn’t help noticing that all solid state drives are coming out in 2.5″ and smaller form factors, so it got me thinking that it’s only a matter of time before a high end gaming chassis is full of 2.5″ mounts rather than 3.5″ ones.

Obviously SSD isn’t quite there yet, but even 2.5″ magnetic drives seem to compare pretty favorably to 3.5″ desktop drives. They’re quieter, smaller (duh), and with the 7200RPM spindle speeds, the assumption is that the speed is pretty close. They also dump less heat into your precious case, which means less airflow is necessary and again less noise.

I managed to get my hands on a 160GB Seagate Momentus 7200.2 and a Samsung F1 750GB in a real David & Goliath battle. I’ve only run a couple benchmarks for now because I want to get into RAID performance, which I think is really important because as they’ve discovered in servers, you can fit several times more 2.5″ drives in the same space.

Seagate Momentus 7200.2 160GB 2.5″ “Notebook” Hard Drive

Samsung F1 750GB 7200RPM 3.5″ Desktop Hard Drive

I guess my results weren’t that impressive, but it’s important to notice that as far as the access times go, the drives were actually very close. That’s important for multi-tasking, as well as for quick access to small files. It’s not that often you’re actually going to need the full read and write bandwidth of your drive in a typical desktop scenario, but that obviously doesn’t apply to I/O intensive operations like video editing or systems with limited system RAM that are using the swap file all the time.

Hoping to do a follow up shortly with RAID-0 performance for the 2.5″ competitor.