The Ion 1208 Available now with 2.5" SATA/SAS Hard Drives!
Over the past year, drive manufacturers have released a number of 2.5-inch hard drives for server applications. While these small form factor drives were largely used by notebook vendors, the latest drive releases are geared towards the server market. This is made possible by the launch of high-performance 2.5-inch SAS hard drives and high capacity 2.5-inch SATA hard drive.
Intel Servers Rack Form Factor CPU & Chipset Storage Memory Starting At: Purchase Ion 1208 1U • 2x Intel Dual or Quad Core Xeon • Intel 5000P Chipset • Up to 8x Hot-Swap SAS/SATA 2.5" Hard Drives • 8x DDR 667 ECC/Reg DIMM Slots • Up to 32GB Memory $1114 View Specs

Features and Benefits of 2.5-Inch Hard Drives

High Spindle Count

With more drives, your database enjoys more IOPS (IO per second). This is made possible by pooling the drives together in a RAID 5, 6 or 10 configuration. When you use more drives in a RAID configuration, your performance increases because you can spread your IO requests over more drives.

Lower Power Consumption

At idle, the 2.5-inch drives use up to 65% less power than the standard 3.5-inch drives. When you add up the power savings over a large volume of drives, this can be a considerable cost savings in power costs.

Lower Heat Emission

The 2.5-inch drives produce less heat than the standard 3.5-inch drives. As cooling costs in datacenters rise proportional to energy costs, it has become more important to seek solutions that produce less heat.

SAS Hard Drives

High performance drives are available in 2.5-inch form factor with either 10,000 RPM or 15,000 RPM. The largest 10k RPM drive currently available is 147GB from Seagate. The largest 15k RPM drive currently available is 73GB from Seagate.

SATA Hard Drives

High capacity drives are available in 2.5-inch form factor up to 500GB capacity.