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.

Comments

Okay, Less Power

[Nom du Keyboard]

Okay, less power. But what have you given up in the trade-off?

your wallet

[reaktor]

You can bet these will be more pricey.

This might be interesting for large arrays...

[Gordo_1]

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.

but will it run Linux?

[frovingslosh]

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?

That's nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Would it make a difference in desktop machines?

[Quadraginta]

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).

Re:Three obvious things

[More_Cowbell]

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.

Re:Power consumption of a hard drive == ???

[soldack]

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..."

People don't even read the SUMMARIES any more ...

[trolltalk.com]

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.

High volume

[amRadioHed]

Hitachi is promising these drives in high volume later this year. Damn, I was hoping that the drives would be quieter too.