2.5" is cool

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (the old IBM Disk Division) have announced a 500GB 2.5" drive for laptops. Not particularly interesting I hear you say, however these latest drives from HGST now come in Standard and "Enhanced Availability" versions. The enhanced version claims to be able to run a 24/7 workload rather than standard day to day access required in a laptop.

So does this mean these SATA drives are suitable to use to build an array? Well, first of all they are not fast ast 5400RPM. It would also be nice to have the SAS rather than SATA interface, but just look at the power consumption figures; 1.9W in read/write mode!

How about IBM taking the XiV technology and using 2.5" drives with this power consumption and capacity - now that would give EMC something to complain about!