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Hitachi Releases World's Most Energy-Efficient HDD

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the fewer-hamsters-required dept.

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.

4 of 118 comments (clear)

  1. This might be interesting for large arrays... by Gordo_1 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. Re:Would it make a difference in desktop machines? by Quadraginta · · Score: 3, Informative

    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).

  3. Re:Power consumption of a hard drive == ??? by soldack · · Score: 3, Informative

    My bet is that solid state drives do much better. Moving parts consume a lot of power.
    http://news.digitaltrends.com/news/story/12556/samsung_announces_64_gb_solid_state_drive
    "...consumes just half a Watt when operating (one tenth of a Watt when idle)"

    vs. from the article:

    "Through a 40-percent power reduction, Hitachi GST has delivered unmatched idle power utilization of 3.6 watts on the 250GB capacity model and 4.8 watts on models with capacities of 320GB or greater. Similarly, the P7K500 has reduced its active power requirements to 6.4 watts and 8.2 watts for its one- and two-disk models, respectively. By utilizing roughly half the 7 watts of idle power typically allocated for hard drives..."

    --
    -- soldack
  4. People don't even read the SUMMARIES any more ... by trolltalk.com · · Score: 3, Informative

    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