Hello,

I have 8 X 80Gb laptop hard drives lying around here and a dual p3 server. I wanted to ask the people round here whether it's wise to use laptop hard drives in servers? This server will be used for mail, i think.

your opinions are welcomed

Laptop drives are, in general, slower than their desktop counterparts.
They run at 5400 rpm, have small cache (or none at all), and they are setup, by default, to turn off itself after a few minutes of inactivity.

If the slow performance is not an issue to you, you still have a connector problem. The physical interface isn't the same for desktop hard drives. May be you may use a kind of adaptor, but the small price of a desktop drive would me think twice.

..and you may have problems to attach this drive in the server's case too.
They are installed on notebooks case by pressure, not by bolts.

I'll provide more specific information for discussion.

the laptop hard drives are samsung 2.5" 80Gb hard drives, with 5400RPM and 8mb cache (IDE type). By snooping around the drive i've think i've found some sort of mounting blocks for screws.

The server case is unbranded 4 hot swap capable 1u rack.

I was thinking of putting 2 2.5" drives in each hot swap bay and thereby getting a 640Gb RAID 5 array in a single U.

If these drives run slower does anyone how by how much on a standard 3.5" ide drive? Or would I need to simply consult the seek times?

I simple measure of its performance is comparing the results of "hddparm -t" and "hdparm -T". The -i option is very usefull to get and compare information for both laptop drive and desktop drive.

Now, with more info, looks like it is a decent drive. Your case is nice too...its have hot-swap bays....

Now, the only problem I see, is the cost. If you are planning to put this disk in a server, in a raid configuration, I must advice you to have a spare drive in your hands. If anything goes wrong with any drive of your raid setup, you need to replace it ASP, same model if possible. And mobile disks are expensive, aren't ? At least, here in Brazil they cost 4 times more than a regular one.

ill try the hdparm tests and see what it comes up with im guessing it'll be about 20% faster on the desktop machine

another quick question, if ide drives have SMART what do sata drives have?

I don't know. I would like to know that answer too. Anybody following this thread knows about SMART on SATA disks ?

just found out that a set of programs called smartmontools in ubuntu are quite handy for ide drives

And it works for SATA ? I already had tried with smartmoontools but it can't handle my SATA2 disks....

the smartmontools cannot handle sata or sata2 drives.

maybe manually add the sata drive? smartctl -P showall