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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.

5 of 118 comments (clear)

  1. Okay, Less Power by Nom+du+Keyboard · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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."
  2. Three obvious things by ciroknight · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:Three obvious things by More_Cowbell · · Score: 4, Interesting

      A) These drives were basically designed for datacenters, so you can look at paying out the teeth for them.
      Actually I doubt that. From TFA, they are 7200rpm SATA drives. In data centers this is really not what you will find.
      All servers in data centers are running 15000rpm these days. Mostly SCSI until recently, in my experience.
      --
      Experience teaches only the teachable. -AH
  3. but will it run Linux? by frovingslosh · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
  4. Re:This might be interesting for large arrays... by Skapare · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Portable drives powered via the USB connection can take more power than USB permits. Get the drive well under that level and you wan't need to use those double-USB cables.

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    now we need to go OSS in diesel cars