> One cloud storage provider, Backblaze, regularly publishes reports on > harddisk reliability (they obviously have a lot of data on that :-)
All of them seem to be 3½" as well. Interesting. It actually looks like the 2½" HDD market has been abandoned: 5 years ago, the largest HDD were 5TB for 2½" and 10TB for 3½". Since then, it seems like nothing new happened in the 2½" space, whereas the 3½" drives kept growing (tho only about 15% per year). Based on what I've heard, I suspect that to be competitive in the datacenter, 2½" drives would need to offer about half the capacity of 3½" drives (of course, that also presumes manufacturers going through the trouble of producing CMR drives in 2½" form factor). OTOH for an end user who doesn't need more than 8TB of disk space, 2½" drives can often be a better option (assuming you have enough SATA ports). Stefan