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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.
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?
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
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).
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.
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
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.
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