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."

Comments

No rotational speed spec.

[niceone]

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?

Re:No rotational speed spec.

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:No rotational speed spec.

[MrNemesis]

From what I remember from the reviews, the disc spins between 5400 and 7200rpm depending on load. Benchmarks showed it's not as fast as equivalent 7200rpm drives of the same capacity, but the performance disparity is in the region on 5-10% at worst. For people worried about power usage and/or noise though, it looks like a superb drive - perfect for an HTPC.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/13379

Re:No rotational speed spec.

[darthflo]

I can't seem to find anything coming from WD mentioning RPM, so the data from some online stores near ("IntelliPower at 5400-7200 RPM) me isn't quite verifiable. According to independent reviews, the drives seem to clock in somewhere between those values, so those might be the theoretical upper and lower limits, respectively.

Assuming the [Green Power] also shares such a seek time, that leaves us with 15 ms [measured access time] minus 9.5 ms [assumed seek time] which equals 5.5 ms, almost exactly the rotational latency associated with a 5400 RPM spindle speed.

(from storagereview.com)

[I]t's easy to convert [WD's values for average rotational latency] to revolutions per minute, or RPM. 5.6 milliseconds of rotational latency works out to about 5,400 RPM, which just happens to be the low end of the GreenPower's spindle speed range. Western Digital says that's by design; the latency spec it lists in the GreenPower's data sheets is merely an estimate based on the spindle speed range of the drive.

(from techreport.com)

Aside from those missing values, the drive's power consumption (4W idle, 7.5W read/write) seem pretty nice compared to the rest of the market.

Re:No rotational speed spec.

[moosesocks]

For that sort of scenario, you'd use the least amount of power if you cached the entire movie (or as much as you could fit) into memory in one fell swoop. Spin up, read the entire file, and spin down.

I seem to recall that one of the ways in which Apple tweaked the battery life of the iPod was to considerably increase the size of the RAM cache, and read as much of the playlist as possible into memory.

Re:No rotational speed spec.

[TheRaven64]

That would, of course, give you better battery life. Even better would be to cache the entire contents of the disk and never spin it up...

In the real world, even if you have enough RAM to cache the movie, other things also want to use some of it. The demands for streaming it from the disk are quite low; around 1-2MB/s, while my laptop's disk can do between 10-30MB/s in sustained transfers. Dropping the speed from 5400RPM to 540RPM would allow this demand to be met without swapping anything out and causing additional disk usage (expensive ones, since they require a lot of seeks) to swap it in again later.

Re:No rotational speed spec.

[PopeRatzo]

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.

Re:No rotational speed spec.

[tomhudson]

TFA says it *might* say you "up to $10/year" on electricity.

In other words, YMMV, etc.

So lets look at REAL figures.

I'll save 4 watts per drive on my 4-drive home box. 16*24*365/1000 = 140 kw/hours.

@ 7 cents/kwh, I'll save a grand total $9.80 for 4 drives, or less than $2.50/drive.

That's if I run it 24 hours/day.

Most likely consumer-use scenario is less than a buck a year. I'll leave my drives spun up at full speed all the time, thank you. Easier to save a LOT more money just by turning off the lights and monitor when I leave for the office.

Re:No rotational speed spec.

[ColdWetDog]

Drop down lists are hard before coffee, is there any other way to undo a bad moderation with the new system?

Don't moderate before coffee. In fact, don't do ANYTHING before coffee.

How Green is Green?

[Anonymous Coward]

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".

Re:5watt savings is "green" ??? sheesh

[brunes69]

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.

Re:5watt savings is "green" ??? sheesh

[MadKeithV]

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.

Re:5watt savings is "green" ??? sheesh

[agildehaus]

Since when is a 5 watt savings on a 3.5 inch hard drive a joke? They typically use 10-14 watts when seeking (maybe 1.5 times that at startup) so any amount of savings that can be expressed as an integer is a significant savings. 2.5" and 1.8" Laptop drives are also FAR more power efficient than desktop drives, averaging about 2-3 watts during seeks.

Solid state drives use about a half a watt from the specs sheets I've looked at.

I'll make you a green PC ...

[ThirdPrize]

now where is my paint.

Solid State?

[Ginger Unicorn]

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

Re:Solid State?

[Kjella]

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).

Re:5watt savings is "green" ??? sheesh

[asc99c]

How much energy do you believe a hard disc uses ?!?!? I thought a typical 7200 rpm desktop drive uses around 12W at max load. My media server at home currently has 11 hard discs, and is built on an Athlon 64 3000+ platform. The total energy use is 150W, measured through a power meter plugged in at the wall. This was up by 9W when I added the latest 2 500GB SATA2 discs.

It would be great if the discs could tell they were being asked to read only 1-2MB/sec and just spin at minimal speed that enabled that. The oldest hard discs in my server are rather old and small - I'll have to start replacing them soon rather than adding more. I'll definitely be looking at this range when I need more space.

I agree 5W isn't much, but it is actually quite a lot for just the hard disc. If every other component of a PC got the same treatment the savings would add up.

Maybe not "green" but useful

[Charles Dodgeson]

My thoughts exactly. 5 watts is a joke and is just a cheap attempt to jump on the "green" bandwagon. Unfortunately there are clueless folks out their that don't know a 'watt' from a 'when' and they'll get suckered in by this marketing. I fully agree that if the manufacturing process for these consumes more energy, then there is nothing green about these (other than marketing hype).

But, there are plenty of situations where a consumer might wisely pay extra for these drives even if there is no overall positive environmental impact:

1. Laptops have already been mentioned.
2. I like trying to build fanless boxes for noise reasons
3. longer UPS running time for the unreliable grid power we have where I am
4. Every watt I save on power draw for my equipment saves additional power on air conditioning for a substantial chunk of the year.

Re:5watt savings is "green" ??? sheesh

[WindBourne]

shoots, if they sell just a million of these, that is 5MW. That adds up. Besides, many groups go ga-ga over saving .5 watt on always-on devices since, so this will be construed to be even bigger.

What about heat?

[Sensible Clod]

Another important benefit for such an improvement would be for cool/quiet computing, which is high on my list of desired system attributes. To put it simply, it's like taking a 4 or 5 watt heater out of the machine (which should also make it last longer).

I'm a little concerned about parking those heads all the time, however. Last thing I need is a cool-running drive with worn-out ramps...