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Western Digital Touts New 'Green' Drives

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the save-the-platters dept.

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."

3 of 119 comments (clear)

  1. No rotational speed spec. by niceone · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Interesting - WD don't tell you the rotational speed! Must be the first drive that doesn't. In the rotational speed row it just says "IntelliPower" and below "A fine-tuned balance of spin speed, transfer rate, and caching algorithms designed to deliver both significant power savings and solid performance."
    I guess I'd need to see some independent benchmarking before I would believe that performance is not hurt. Also is the power saving dependent on the drive not being used flat out?

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    ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
    1. Re:No rotational speed spec. by TheRaven64 · · Score: 3, Interesting
      It sounds like the drive alters its rotational speed based on the usage. This would be really nice in a laptop drive. For example, when watching a video or listening to music, it would take less power to spin the drive slowly than to spin it up to full speed and then spin it down. I'm not sure about datacenter use. It might be that it could spin slower during periods of low demand and at full speed at other times.

      Hard drive power management is hard to get right, since spinning the drive up uses a lot of power, but keeping it spinning fast also uses some. If you spin the drive down, and then use it again, you use more power than if you leave it spinning. If you leave it spinning and then don't use it then you're similarly wasting power. Being able to spin the drive up a little bit might be a nice compromise. So would adding a large non-volatile cache.

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      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  2. Solid State? by Ginger+Unicorn · · Score: 3, Interesting

    How does this compare to solid state drives in terms of power efficiency?

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    (1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons