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Hitachi Releases World's Most Energy-Efficient HDD
An anonymous reader writes "Today Hitachi released what they are calling the 'world's most energy efficient desktop hard drive' capable of reducing the active and idle power consumption by up to 40 percent over the previous generation." The drive will come in a range of flavors starting at 250GB and ranging to 500GB. Hitachi is promising these drives in high volume later this year.
Okay, less power. But what have you given up in the trade-off?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
You can bet these will be more pricey.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
This post not meant to be insightful or funny, I really want to know.
Compared to what?
Watts per Gigabyte, i doubt it.
but can they get rid of that horrible grinding noise?
A) These drives were basically designed for datacenters, so you can look at paying out the teeth for them.
B) Latency. Nowhere did they mention the "wake-up" time from the Low RPM mode, but you can guarantee it's horrendous. "Average Latency" as the specs say, only tell you what happened during test conditions, conditions very unlikely to put it into Low RPM mode.
C) Density. Cutting edge drives are more dense.
If I were Google, these might sound like attractive trade offs.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
but for most desktops and servers, at 6-8 watts idle and 10-12 watts when actively seeking, HDD power consumption typically represents 5% or less of the overall power consumption of a modern system. Good PR for Hitachi though.
OK, I've read the article, but he important question was not addresses: Will it run Linux, or XP for that matter, or does it get some of it's power savings by the same technique some new notebook drive do, embedded flash memory that is only supported in that awful Vista and not XP?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
We have a closet full of hard drives, some of which have consumed zero Watts for about a decade.
How's that for energy efficient?
Maybe it will be on the Christmas wish-list of all environmentally-conscious or budget-strapped geeks everywhere. Because they don't have time to release it for anything else.
My understanding of how computers are powered is limited, but if the drive requires less power will the power supply draw less power from the outlet? I would have thought that PSUs draw a constant amount.
It's not very noisy either, although it won't match silent 2,5 " drives by a long shot. So it's not that great for fan-less systems and all that.
This range of drives:
2.6/2.8 dB typical idle acoustics
WD Scorpio (pretty silent 2,5 " HDD @ 5400 rpm):
2.0 typical idle acoustics
Yes. No. If you leave it on of course, and if the drives won't spin down completely (which they normally won't, too many services etc.). This is why I'm going for a flash/hdd combination, so the HDD can spin down.
I would have thought that PSUs draw a constant amount.
Goodness, no. The current the power supply draws from the wall varies with the amount of power it's being asked to supply. You can easily verify this yourself by noticing how much hotter your laptop gets when you're making it do a lot of work. The heat it puts out is the final form of the energy the power supply draws from the wall (or the battery).
Okay, so it's evergy efficent. That'll make al gore happy. anything for the rest of us?
To live without killing is a thought which could electrify the world, if men were capable of staying awake long enough.
But how about improving seek times and failure rates, boys?
For any component (PSU included) power in == power out, always. Now, that includes things like waste heat as a path for power to go out, but you'd have to contrive a circuit very carefully to make it increase waste heat output by 1W for every 1W decrease in draw from downstream devices.
It may seem counterintuitive -- it did to me at one time -- but decreasing the draw on the PSU would indeed decrease its draw from the line.
The output of a 450W psu (power supply unit) can vary from zero (in theory) up to 450W. The psu will provide whatever power is demanded by the internal components.
WD's got one in their series named for german scheisse-pr0n: Caviar GP. 4W idle, capacities up to 1TB.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
More efficient than SSD'?
(yes I know you can't get SSD's of this size yet, but size isn't the focal point here)
I think that while a power-cutting hard drive for desktops, workstations, and servers is a great idea, I think that would be much more critical for a laptop, since power is its biggest limiting factor (i.e. the obvious). Why don't companies focus on maximizing flash storage for higher performance in these settings? That way, servers can not only get completely awesome read speeds, but hopefully boosted write speeds at rates comparable to platter-based hard drives. Or, at least until that idea substantiates, much faster hard drives than what we are limited at now (15K RPM)?
I've heard "paying through the nose" but not "paying out the teeth".
Deleted
The parent is at least a tiny bit funny and insightful, but flamebait? Lot's of stress around, I see... Maybe because it is monday.
Lets go back to what I originally stated - that these drives are probably NOT for data centers.
From the summary of TFA:
> "Today Hitachi released what they are calling the 'world's most energy efficient desktop hard drive'
These are probably NEVER going to go into data centers, at least not under any sort of warranty.
Kevin Smith on Prince
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
As someone who's lost two hard drives in the last year, I don't give a damn about energy efficiency. I want reliability. Thank $DEITY that solid-state drives are finally coming. Just a few more years...
So in theory, if I upgraded my PSU from the 400 Watt one I have now to a 1000 Watt PSU without upgrading any other PC components, it would use about the same amount of power?
How about energy efficient clockless CPUs? Or even GPUs? These new Geforce 8800s will eat up 100 watts idling. Versus, what, five on a hard disk?
Yes, in theory. But why does any reasonable user need that much power?
I'm genuinely curious. What *is* it that drives the demand for power supplies that can source that much power? I run a home file server (a crappy Pentium II -- 266 MHz, yay) with 7 hard drives stuck in it off a rather wimpy power supply -- almost certainly no more than 350 W -- probably closer to 250 W. (Not sure what it is, and I can't be arsed to go check.)
so that you'll know that it's working. :)
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
I don't think anyone really needs 1000W in a desktop, but with quad core CPUs, SLI video cards and multiple hard drives 500/600W isn't unreasonable.
And to answer the grandparent, a higher capacity power supply could use more power if the efficiency at low loads is worse than the lower capacity power supply (and it usually is). A typical modern desktop system at idle will only use around 75W of power. Let's say the 400W is 75% efficient at 75W load and the 1000W is 70% at the same load. The 400W will pull 100W from the wall and the 1000W will pull 107W, so 7W of power will be wasted.
high-end CPUs and GPUs, as well as massive drive arrays (if its all in the same box, add a few watts at least of cooling too, possibly tens of watts)
The amount of power the PSU draws from the wall is equal to the power it outputs divided by the efficiency. However, not all PSUs are equally efficient, and the efficiency of a given PSU varies depending on the load.
Most PSUs have a "sweet spot" for efficiency somewhere in the middle of their output range, so - all else being equal - small PSUs will be more efficient with light loads but large PSUs will be more efficient for heavy loads.
For example: A Core 2 Duo system with 2 GB of ram and a high-end video card may only draw 100 watts at idle. This load is much better suited to a small power supply; a good 400W PSU may be able to supply 100 watts at 80% efficiency, which would mean 100/.8 = 125 watts from the wall. A 1000W PSU may only provide 65% efficiency for the same load, and draw over 150 watts from the wall. On the other hand, if you start playing a game and the load spikes to 300 watts, that 400W PSU might drop to 75% efficiency while the 1000W could climb to 80%. The 1000W PSU would now be using 25W less power than the 400W!
Of course, not all PSUs are created equal. Some models are dismally inefficient and never exceed 65% at any wattage. Others maintain a high efficiency all the way to their rated maximum output. But nearly all power supplies are inefficient at supplying loads less than 20% of their rated maximum, so it's best not to get a higher wattage PSU than necessary unless your computer spends most of its time at high load.
If you want more information on PSU efficiency, check out SilentPCReview's Power section. They have extremely thorough reviews of various PSUs and test their efficiency over a wide range of loads.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Speed, Efficiency, Cost: pick two.
But how does it compare against Western Digital's 1TB Green Power drive?
Are you sure the question was asked stupidly? Or was it perhaps answered rudely (and maybe incorrectly)? For example the Seagate Momentus 5400 PSD Laptop Hybrid drive is one of the drives that contains 256MB of flash memory and is said to be only usable under Vista, and yet it's specs claim it has a SATA 1.5GB/s interface (note that this is a notebook drive and not a 3GB/s desktop drive). So if I was so stupid in asking this question, how do you explain the specs of the Seagate Momentus? And let me ask another stupid question: If hybrid drive techniques really do save power, why would a drive maker who was trying to position it's drives as power saving not use them (aside from the nasty Vista only issue)?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Not if it output the excess amount of power in the form of heat, which seems like what they're doing now.
Can they use this to make an external USB drive that doesn't get hot enough to fry bacon, even when no data has been transferred to/from it for hours?
Cause that drives me nuts.
Drives are cheap, it's the SAN hookups that are expensive. Our 80TB Sun array (Tier II Storage) is full of the same Hitachi disks that I have in my desktop. However, Sun provides the advanced controlers and software to make sure we have zero downtime.
I am curious as to what it costs to actually run a PC. For example, I have a 3 year old Suse Box AMD-64 2Ghz with 2.5GB of RAM and 2x320GB(RAID) + 80GB HD + 3x30 GB HD (total of 6 drives) and a 3 year old Nvidia Video card. Other than the 6 harddrives I don't think that my machine is very atypical of what a lot of people have today. Is this machine drawing more power than a CRT TV, Microwave, refrigerator? Is it really worth it for most people to "worry" about the impact of their computers on their electric bills?
Nice domain. :-)
"Nice domain. :-)"
The previous owner let it lapse, and it was available for 11 months before I checked and went WTF!?!
Back on-topic - I'm surprised some typo squater didn't grab it so for its similarity to trolltech.com.
Kevin Smith on Prince