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Western Digital Touts New 'Green' Drives
An anonymous reader writes "Western Digital today announced the availability of a new line of serial ATA drives that are supposed to use 4 to 5 watts less than other competitive drives from Hitachi GST, Fujitsu and Seagate. The new "GreenPower" line comes in 500GB, 750GB and 1TB capacities. Western Digital says it achieves better power performance by balancing the platter's spin speed in order to make it more efficient, by optimizing seek speeds and by parking the read heads when the disk is idle, according to a Computerworld story."
It's good to see manufacturers trying to reduce power consumption in their products, and I hope the trend continues (without impacting performance). However the big savings are more likely to be found in the manufacturing processes. How much energy could be saved there? How much "greener" could the chemical processes be?
It's neat, it's a start, I'm sure it'll produce a decent amount of ad copy for them, but it's not really very "Green".
When you run a relatively small server room with 40 servers each with 5 drives in a raid that 5 watts turns into 1 kW fairly rapidly.
5 Watts saved on an expected power usage of between 10 and 25 Watts is pretty significant.
See the power usage specs here: http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/storage/hddpower.html, a bit older perhaps, but not that much.
Still not close, but I think they're competing in different markets. If you need 500GB disks, you're not looking at SSDs (unless you got a spare ten grand or so).
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Can't we just go straight to the solid-state memory and stop worrying about "spinning disks"? I mean, think about it: very soon, we're going to laugh about the fact that we used to use these boxes with spinning platters inside to save all of our data.
Personally, I'm not going to be making any further large investment in any storage media that has moving parts. I'll replace drives as they die in my little RAID box, but that's it for me.
I look down at the little 8gig Sansa mp3 player hanging around my neck when I ride my bike and I think: this little thing is pumping wattage into my cottage, rocking my head at serious volume and it runs for 20 hours on a one-hour charge, and I can fit the Herbert von Karajan recording of Wagner's Parsifal like 20 times over and still have room for a few movies, and there's scars all over the case from having bounced it off the pavement countless times, but it works like a charm. This has to be the future.
You are welcome on my lawn.