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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."

4 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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    1. Re:No rotational speed spec. by MrNemesis · · Score: 5, Informative

      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

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    2. Re:No rotational speed spec. by darthflo · · Score: 4, Informative
      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.
  2. Re:5watt savings is "green" ??? sheesh by brunes69 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.