Traditionally, 2.5” hard drives have been viewed as “mobile” or “laptop” drives because of their predominant use in laptop PCs. Today, we are seeing examples of 2.5” drives -- and even smaller form factors – available for a wide range of storage designs. We expect to see this trend continue with the acceptance of 2.5” HDDs in an ever broadening array of applications throughout 2003 and beyond.

This white paper focuses on the uses and features of SATA Extended Duty Mobile 2.5" Drives in high-density applications in which power, performance and capacity features are a priority. Examples of these uses are Storage Blades, Video Servers and compact RAID systems. Enterprise storage systems will also make the transition to a 2.5" form factor but will use higher reliability, higher performance drives with the advantages that come with a SCSI protocol. Enterprise systems are not covered in this paper.