Western Digital's "Green" Hard Drives

MojoKid writes "Eco-friendly or 'green' products are becoming much more fashionable these days, especially in things like high-end electronics, where the impact on the environment and the disposal of these products is being regulated now by such things as the RoHS compliance standard. In addition, power consumption is also being looked at more closely for all the obvious reasons. Hard Drive manufacturer Western Digital recently took the initiative by being the first drive manufacture to produce and market a lower power version of their Caviar line of hard drives. The numbers here show that a green hard drive will probably only save an average end user about 10 watts in total system power consumption. However, from a data center perspective, where demand for storage is growing by the petabyte at an alarming rate, 10 watts per drive can certainly add up quickly."

Comments

SSD power consumption ?

[Anonymous Coward]

how much power does a SSD take in comparison to a HD ?

Re:SSD power consumption ?

[Brian Gordon]

Which is more expensive, the power to run a magnetic hard drive and a tree to absorb the pollution or whatever, or a SSD?

Re:SSD power consumption ?

[Anonymous Coward]

From the ones that I've seen they typically use less than 1 W during operation and less than 0.1 W during standby. They certainly aren't high power devices nor do they need cooling.

Re:SSD power consumption ?

[English French Man]

There aren't any moving parts in an SSD (obviously) so the power consumption might be lower.

Wikipedia seems to think that this is true only for small capacity SSDs...

Re:SSD power consumption ?

[asuffield]

Wrong question. The correct question is: how much power per gigabyte does flash storage consume compared to a hard drive? It is not useful to have a 1Gb flash device that consumes 1/100th of the power of a 500Gb hard drive, unless you weren't going to use that space anyway.

Right now it's not that impressive, because the storage density is lagging behind. This may change.

Re:SSD power consumption ?

[Disoculated]

Yes. That's it, that's exactly what he was asking.

OH, if you're looking for an ANSWER, that would be that an SSD takes on average 50% of the power, but perhaps 1/3 to 1/5 of the capacity of a similar form-factor hard drive. Meaning that per-drive they use less and per gig they use more.

Re:SSD power consumption ?

[code4fun]

Somewhere between 1W to 3W

Reduce power consumption can also...

[Anonymous Coward]

be transferred to the laptop tablet market. A Win-Win situation. It's greener and it'll last longer in a laptop.

How are the savings made?

[Anonymous Coward]

What the summary really should be telling us the lazy people is how are the savings made?

On the summary page both drivers get smacked over "lower performance than other 1TB drives", and if there's only a 10 W difference I'd assume that savings are made through more aggressive power savings.

Please someone correct me, if you manage to read that ad-filled page.

Re:How are the savings made?

[nautsch]

I don't know how they do it, but i see *count* 2 ads on the page. Thanks AdBlock Plus

Re:How are the savings made?

[pixelite]

I remember seeing one of these drives while browsing in a Best Buy. If I remember correctly they save power by running at something like 1300RPM, rather than the usual 5400 or 7200. At least thats what it said on retail packages specs. I saw that and thought, "must have horrible performance, " then I immediately put it back on the shelf.

Re:How are the savings made?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not seeing any adds using AdBlock Plus, with the Easylist filter subscription. Try one of the filter subscriptions, or learn to create your own filters - it's not terribly difficult.

Re:How are the savings made?

[MrMacman2u]

Check you numbers again. These drives are 5400rpm that CAN spin up to 7200rpm speeds... what determines when they DO is another story. Being "green" means you have to save power. To save power you sometimes have to sacrifice performance. It's a trade-off that is inescapable. More of a question to me, is can this "Green Power" feature be disabled if desired instead of constantly dealing with the lower performance of these slower (yet less power hungry) drives? If you're looking for the fastest of the fast and power savings be damned (Me, for example) just buy their standard Cavier drives. They're wicked fast and reliable for their low price. I've run only WD drives for almost a decade and while I have had a few die on me here and there, it's inevitable with ANY hard drive, they perform well, cost less, run cool and are very quiet with excellent reliability. They are all I want in a drive, so I rely on them.

Re:How are the savings made?

[FuturePastNow]

They are 5400RPM drives and CANNOT spin to 7200RPM. The spin speed is not variable. This has been confirmed by reviewers and WD itself.

Note that I'm not saying this is a problem. I think it's great, few things need really fast performance.

I have a ... question

[Anonymous Coward]

So what color these Western Digital's "Green" hard drives have?

They're also very quiet

[A Friendly Troll]

In fact, WD GP drives are the quietest on the market. Found this gem just the other day:

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article804-page2.html

Idle and seek noise are extremely low, and vibrations almost negligible (this is also a very important thing when you have two same drives, for example in a redundant RAID array *cough*).

The power savings aren't 10W, though.

Re:They're also very quiet

[myxiplx]

And I can confirm that. We used six of them in a home NAS server based on that review. Six drives in an Antec P182 case and you can't even hear the thing when it turns on.

It was so quiet we took it to an empty office because we couldn't believe what we were hearing, and that's when we found the ticking of my watch is far louder than the noise this computer makes when booting. Awesome drives, and an awesome case. Would highly recommend them both.

Re:They're also very quiet

[shdwtek]

They run very quiet indeed. I was very impressed with the WD1000FYPS RE2 drive that we got in at work. I couldn't even tell it was running. Even when touching the drive, it's hard to tell. According to the website, that drive in particular uses technology to reduce problems caused by system vibration. Not to mention it long-formatted 1T in a 1-2 minutes or so.

Re:They're also very quiet

[MrLogic17]

for example in a redundant RAID array

Redundant RAID? Redundant.

Re:They're also very quiet

[xZgf6xHx2uhoAj9D]

I think that was the (deliberate) joke, hence the *cough* at the end.

Re:They're also very quiet

[viper66]

I have the 1TB GP model and I have a hard time believing that it uses significantly less power than my 250GB Hitachi drive. It consistently runs hotter than the Hitachi. I thought maybe the sensor was wrong but it feels hotter to the touch too. As of right now my Hitachi is at 42 C, WD is at 44 C. It has hit 50 C before, while the Hitachi peaks around 46 C.

Re:They're also very quiet

[NevermindPhreak]

What power supply and fans did you use? The PSU is typically the loudest thing in my system, but I admin I usually don't buy a very good PSU. You'd think I would know better. ^_^

Re:They're also very quiet

[myxiplx]

I used silentpcreview as my guide for pretty much everything, although I'm running OpenSolaris so driver support limited me slightly. Total spec and price was:

Spec list (with prices from dabs.com and scan.co.uk):
Antec P182 Tower Case: £67.04
Corsair 520HX PSU: £48.16
Gigabyte GA-MA69G-S3H Motherboard: £37.63
AMD Sempron 64 LE-1100, 1.9Ghz: £20.41
2x Kingston 1GB DDR2: £13 each
6x Western Digital Caviar 1TB WD10EACS: £144.94 each
LG Black SATA DVD+/-RW: £15.99
Supermicro 8 port SATA controller: £62.10

Grand Total: £1,160.16 + VAT

A word of warning: The Antek case is an absolute swine to cable, be prepared to spend a good amount of time fighting with it as you're building the computer. The PSU mounts at the bottom too, so you need one with long cables for the motherboard power.

Re:They're also very quiet

[TeamSPAM]

I put one of the WD GP drives in my TiVo HD. In the default settings, it was still to loud for my entertainment center. I took it out so I could run the Feature Tool from Hitachi to change the acoustic levels. After that it seemed my quieter and haven't seen any effect on performance in the TiVo.

Re:They're also very quiet

[A Friendly Troll]

I have the 1TB GP model and I have a hard time believing that it uses significantly less power than my 250GB Hitachi drive. It consistently runs hotter than the Hitachi. I thought maybe the sensor was wrong but it feels hotter to the touch too. As of right now my Hitachi is at 42 C, WD is at 44 C. It has hit 50 C before, while the Hitachi peaks around 46 C. I had a drive that insisted it was 5C below ambient temperature, and another one that claimed 49C just after turning the computer on. :)

That said, your Hitachi probably has one or two platters, while the big drive has three. It's normal that drives with more platters have a higher operating temperature. You still might need to work on improving ventilation inside your case, judging by those temps - HDD cages are notorious for blocking airflow, the air intake on most cases is usually highly restrictive (even if it only has a honeycomb grill; snip it off).

Can you take a couple of pics?

Re:They're also very quiet

[viper66]

The Hitachi is a 2 platter drive, model HDT722525DLA380. Both of the drives in question are mounted using 5.25 to 3.5 adapters, near the top of the case, with no fans on them. Hitachi is on the bottom, WD above it, optical drive above that. The drive cage in the case, which does have a fan on it, is full with other drives.

/dev/sda: HDS722525VLSA80: 31 C
/dev/sdb: HDS722525VLSA80: 32 C
/dev/sdc: HDS722525VLSA80: 32 C
/dev/sdd: HDS722525VLSA80: 33 C
/dev/sde: HDT722525DLA380: 43 C
/dev/sdf: WDC WD10EACS-00ZJB0: 46 C

Re:They're also very quiet

[Anonymous Coward]

. . . for example in a redundant RAID array.

Dude, you should know by know that you don't need a redundant RAID array (of inexpensive disks). There is no benefit to having more than one RAID array (of inexpensive disks).

Re:They're also very quiet

[A Friendly Troll]

Ugh. No wonder :/

Maybe you could get a 2x5.25", uhm, thingie with a fan. Scythe has one, it's called "Kama Bay".

Re:They're also very quiet

[A Friendly Troll]

But if they're WD GP, you are going to save a lot of Watts in your redundant reduntant disk array array.

Re:They're also very quiet

[hjf]

Self-quote:

a redundant RAID array? is that a redundant redundant array of inexpensive disks array? wow, an array of arrays that is REDUNDANT! So if every RAID had two disks, you need to have 8 drives!

Modded -1 redundant. Best. Mod. Ever. Karma reserve is great.

Ads up

[downix]

You get a HD with 10W less power need, a northbridge with 5W less power need, a CPU with 5W less power need, a video card with 15W less power need, a soundcard with 5W less power need, you've saved 40W already with minimal change in performance.

Re:Ads up

[Ngarrang]

You get a HD with 10W less power need, a northbridge with 5W less power need, a CPU with 5W less power need, a video card with 15W less power need, a soundcard with 5W less power need, you've saved 40W already with minimal change in performance. I gotta agree whole-heartedly here. For most people, really high super performance numbers are not that big of an issue. Few of us non-Vista people will every stress the max transfer numbers to really notice the small overall drop. For a brand new system, this would seem like a Good Thing (tm) to add to the shopping list. I am just trying to ponder what *I* would need 1 Tb of disk space for, when my 40Gb drive is barely used.

Re:Ads up

[lazy-ninja]

I did this on my most recent system.

During general use (web browsing, chatting, online java games like settlers of catan, etc) it uses around 40-45Watts.

This is switching from a PC that used between 110-120watts for the same thing.

You can save a lot if you shop smart.

The best part is I spent under $500 on the whole machine.
The other best part is machines that efficient are also completely silent without spending big money on super silent fans. I am using stock cooling on it.

Re:Ads up

[gEvil (beta)]

It does add up. The problem is that unless OEMs start including these drives in computers, they probably won't sell very well. Or more likely, the geek who does buy one will end up offsetting the savings by throwing it in his machine with a 750W power supply and monster graphics card(s).

Re:Ads up

[Applekid]

The problem is that unless OEMs start including these drives in computers, they probably won't sell very well. If someone is looking at an OEM machine, they probably don't know what performance parameters a hard drive could possibly have other than space. They do know "green" so it might make the consumer feel better that it's got a nice eco-friendly label and a picture of a rainforest or something on the box.

. . . the geek who does buy one will end up offsetting the savings by throwing it in his machine with a 750W power supply and monster graphics card(s). If they're that serious about gaming, they probably would be solely focused on the performance of the drive and what the benchmarks say, skipping version emblazoned with the aforementioned logos and nature pictures.

Re:Ads up

[everphilski]

I am just trying to ponder what *I* would need 1 Tb of disk space for, when my 40Gb drive is barely used.

I was tearing up my 350 GB drive a year ago just with digital pictures. My wife and I have a 6 megapixel camera and we regularly take pictures of the kids to share with the grandparents and relatives who are all a thousand miles away. We have about 20 Mini-DV's worth of video (10GB apiece) of random stuff which I **don't** have uploaded to the computer. Buying a new hard drive and backing that media up, like I should, will instantly consume 200GB of data.

The other night I was running a computer simulation I wrote (a CFD code) and the output files and intermediate data was consuming over a gigabyte an hour of hard disk space. Now you can throw a lot of that away but for reference cases, for validation, you need to save that stuff to prove your code can replicate good results.

A terabyte of drive space? Give me 5 years and it'll be gone, easy, just in newly created data, not to mention purchased computer software and media.

Re:Ads up

[MMC Monster]

Not to mention if you use your home computer to stream media through the house. mp3/ogg files don't typically take up too much space (I can't imagine the vast majority of people using up more than a couple hundred GB), but what about TIVO-type DVRs. They can eat through a terabyte if you're not careful.

Re:Ads up

[stokessd]

Sure if you stream lossy compressed files they don't take up too much space. But if you stream lossless files, you eat up a lot of drive space. I've got about 800 CD's ripped to my media server and in lossless format (FLAC) they are taking up about 400 gig. Now if you want to keep a backup of them so you don't have to feed your CD's through the ripping process again, there's another 400 gig.

When I add all my digital photos, and scans of negatives, and 20 years of files in my home directory plus research data etc, a TB is gone in a hurry. Not all of it needs to be spinning, but when you add in backups of a couple computers, and the desire to have certain critical things backed up a couple times, storage is never enough.

I've got about 4.5 Tb worth of drives when I add them all up (externals, server Raid, internal drives in various machines, etc), and I don't feel like I'm swimming in space. I don't have video ripped either, lord help me if I ever decide to do that.

Sheldon

Re:Ads up

[electrictroy]

Last year I was living in a hotel room with a big fat internet pipe. I was downloading stuff faster than I could watch it, so I purchased an external 300 gig drive. It was full in about 3 months time.

Now I am home again, with a slow connect, and slowly but surely watching all the TV shows and movies I acquired. In retrospect, I probably should have bought a 1000 gig drive.

Re:Ads up

[petehead]

Exactly. The article saying that it "will only save you 10 watts" mirrors the selfish opinion of many. There will not be some magical devices that perform well and run on bird feces and spit. Sure it will only save one person with one drive 10 watts, but it can save a lot of watts if a lot of people do it. And like the parent said, there are other components just in your computer where you can reduce power consumption. We are only going to work out this energy crisis by chipping away at it.

Re:Ads up

[camperslo]

The problem is that unless OEMs start including these drives in computers, they probably won't sell very well. Or more likely, the geek who does buy one will end up offsetting the savings by throwing it in his machine with a 750W power supply and monster graphics card(s).

Yes, the choice of GPU certainly is very significant. A while back I built up a PVR using GMA950 to keep initial and long term costs down. It'd be awful for demanding games, but works great for HD video. Total system power consumption (less display) 82 Watts (measured during video compression). That's with a slightly overclocked Core 2 Duo too. I'm sure an Apple-TV uses far less than 82 Watts, but for scaling 1080i to 720p I needed more CPU.

The raw power rating for the power supply does not tell you anything about how much power you'll consume. That is simply a maximum output rating. It's a bit like saying a 120 Volt outlet in your house is rated to deliver 2400 Watts when fed from a 20 Amp circuit with nothing else running. The actual consumption depends on the load current you draw.
Power supplies do have conversion losses which are reflected by an efficiency rating. The rated numbers still don't tell you exactly what to expect since efficiency varies depending on how much of a load you have, and which outputs are doing the work.
The more you're consuming, the more important the efficiency rating is. I found some really cheap 600 Watt power supplies on sale, shipping included, for $15. No efficiency rating was given, and I'd suspect something so cheap of having problems when actually being asked to deliver close to 600 Watts, but they've worked flawlessly at low power levels.

Actual consumption of components and whole systems is usually quite different from sticker/spec-sheet figures. Some of those reflect maximum capabilities, some reflect things like startup surge currents, all generally change with options and actual use. Even something like running displays at the lowest acceptable brightness makes a significant difference. It's very helpful to use a meter such as the Kill-A-Watt (set to Watts, not Volt*Amperes) to get a feel for these things.

Since power is fairly expensive where I am, I figure a cost of about $1 per month for every 10 Watts used continuously. Between torrents and recording at all hours, continuous applies for my PVR. Saving 10 Watts doesn't sound like much, but over 5 years that's about $60. If one likes to archive shows, it is quite likely that more than one drive will be used eventually multiplying the costs and savings. Of course if one keeps some archives on externals and powers them down, that would help even more. If OSes are not supporting drive sleep on a drive-by-drive basis, some changes there could save quite a bit too.
Using energy saving drives, using fewer big drives instead of a larger number of older small ones, using an energy efficient CPU, and avoiding a power hungry GPU if it isn't needed all add up to much more substantial energy savings. And remember, it's not just about the cost of energy, there's the environmental impact as well.

I haven't actually made measurements to see how much the power consumption of GPUs varies with what they're doing. I would hope that designs now, or in the near future, will allow a major fallback in consumption when user needs are not very demanding.

When people brag about benchmarks, I'd like to see one more added - one generated by dividing the traditional benchmark by the power consumption.

Re:Ads up

[cyclocommuter]

I rip entire DVDs to my hard drive which averages to about 7 GB per DVD. Initially I was encoding them to DivX, xViD, or H264 to save space but it was just taking too much time... 2 to 3 hours for high quality compressed file (1.5 - 2 GB on average with AC3 sound) on a quad core. I decided to just dump the raw unencrypted files to disk figuring out (correctly) that the price per gigabyte is bound to keep going down. A 1TB drive would be able to store ~120 un-encoded DVDs.

Re:Ads up

[adisakp]

You forgot to mention energy efficient power supply. Typical power supplies waste 30-45% of the power (only 55-70% efficiency).

Buy a power supply with an "80 Plus" certification and you will save quite a bit of power as these PS are required to reach 80% efficiency at 20%,50% and 100% of their rated loads. Some hit 85-86% efficiency at their optimal loads.

On a computer using 200W of power, the "80 Plus" PS will save you 40W right off the bat - or as much as the savings you mentioned from the HD, CPU, chipset, and video card combined. BTW, no one overly concerned about power savings really has a separate soundcard anymore.

Re:Ads up

[iamhassi]

"I am just trying to ponder what *I* would need 1 Tb of disk space for, when my 40Gb drive is barely used."

pOrn of course! After all the internet is for porn

Re:Ads up

[Slurgi]

But for most people, a much simpler way to save this much energy (or more) is as simple as remembering to turn off lights when not occupying a certain area.

Re:Ads up

[JonathanR]

Care to reveal your specs?

Re:Ads up

[adisakp]

Or more likely, the geek who does buy one will end up offsetting the savings by throwing it in his machine with a 750W power supply and monster graphics card(s).

A 750W PS that is "80 plus" certified uses less power at a low load (say 200W) than most 250-300W Power Supplies -- on the order of 20-40 Watts less. Most high-end power supplies you can buy are now "80 plus" certified.

And certain newer video cards (not SLI/ X2 / Crossfire mind you) are more power efficient as well. The process shrink to 65nm for the 9600GT means there is a card out there that gets about 90% the power of the 8800GT with significant power savings -- the power savings are enough that there are a couple passively cooled models of 9600GT's available.

Re:Ads up

[legoman666]

I bet that number doesn't include the monitor. 1 19" LCD can easily use 30-40w, and a bigger 22" will eat 50-55w.

Re:Ads up

[aclarke]

I am just trying to ponder what *I* would need 1 Tb of disk space for, when my 40Gb drive is barely used.

Well, I think you've asked a question with a self-evident answer. *You* don't need 1TB of disk space. Others do. For instance, we just had our first baby and in anticipation of that I purchased a Canon HG10 video camera that records at 1080i (or 24p). In the first month or so of usage, we've generated over 100GB of video when it's expanded out to work with. The source files are much smaller, but then again I haven't backed that up anywhere either.

Add into that my PVR which at the setting I use, uses about 5.5GB/hr recording TV. It's going to be much larger when I buy an HDTV and figure out how to record in high-def.

Then of course there's my 120GB or so of music (I record in lossless). Add to that another 50GB or so of digital photos, and the need to back all of that up.

Oh yeah. Then there's client databases and everything I need for the work that pays for all this.

So that's where *I* use it. I may be slightly ahead of the usage curve, but in 5 years this will be normal. At that point I'll likely have 10TB of drive space and you'll be wondering how you're going to fill your 500GB drive ;-)

Re:Ads up

[lazy-ninja]

No it doesn't.

How is that relevant to my point?

I was pointing out that I built a good, inexpensive computer that consumes a good 60-70watts less than my previous machine.

The monitor, didn't change.

Re:Ads up

[lazy-ninja]

Sure, might be easier just to mail you a newegg chart with the stuff, I built similar ones for a few friends in the past month.

Re:Ads up

[try_anything]

Or more likely, the geek who does buy one will end up offsetting the savings by throwing it in his machine with a 750W power supply and monster graphics card(s).

Savings are savings. Their accidental proximity to waste means nothing. If an environment-hating, beef-eating, AC-loving, 50" TV-in-every-room asshole drives a Toyota Prius, he saves as much gas as a non-showering, grass-eating hippie who also drives a Prius. Actually, he'll probably save more, since he probably drives more. The fact that he doesn't have a consistent green ethos doesn't hurt the gas mileage on his Prius. The belief that inconsistency discounts the value of a beneficial action is based on the social advantages of having an identity that is easily identified and classified by other people. When people say things like, "Hybrid Ford Escapes don't make any sense; if you care about the environment, you shouldn't get an SUV, and if you don't, you should buy a standard SUV and save your money," they are ignoring real efficiency and concentrating solely on social identity. It's true that a hybrid SUV won't ingratiate you with anyone, but the energy savings are real no matter whether anyone gives you credit for it. A Ford Escape gets better city mileage than a Honda Fit.

(non-beef-eating Prius driver)

watts != Green

[Dr. Eggman]

Just because something consumes less watts does not mean it is necessarily green. It depends one what is producing the power! If a nuclear Power plant is providing power to a 20 watt HDD, while a coal power plant provides power to a 10 watt HDD, which is more green? We need a better standard of measuring green-... uh -ness. I suggest we measure it differently, based on a device's output of cubic smug per meter.

Re:watts != Green

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because something consumes less watts does not mean it is necessarily green. It depends one what is producing the power! If a nuclear Power plant is providing power to a 20 watt HDD, while a coal power plant provides power to a 10 watt HDD, which is more green? We need a better standard of measuring green-... uh -ness. I suggest we measure it differently, based on a device's output of cubic smug per meter. Cubic smog per meter? This is somehow related to the Time Cube, isn't it? Unless you're suggesting that these devices will only function when plugged into a coal-powered electrical source, I'm afraid you fail third grade reading comprehension.

Re:watts != Green

[sakdoctor]

Exactly. What we need is computers that are powered by the users self-satisfaction.

Come to think of it, this will probably be more practical for mac users, and not because they use less energy.

Re:watts != Green

[PenguSven]

right, i'm sure the chernobyl victims consider nuclear power green? anything that can achieve the same result, while consuming less energy has the potential to be greener. imagine lower-power parts throughout the house. imagine you can cut your power needs by 30% overall. now imagine you use things like solar or wind power, that do not consume resources. they are typically "low" sources of power, so a requirement for less power automatically makes them more feasible. also, imagine the second and third level effects. a device using a lot of electrical energy will put off a lot of heat, which may require a lot of cooling to counteract (imagine a server room for instance, or even the fans in a PC) - these also draw electricity.

Re:watts != Green

[e2d2]

Yes but one could argue that more power consumption leads us to such power needs. How can you move to alternate energy production if everyone is consuming power at an exponential rate?

Also, using less power means less power produced. And since virtually 100% of all power produced impacts the environment..

It's a good thing because it's practical to save energy where we can. That's good engineering. Pay no attention to the bullshit marketing, which I'm sure we'll see a lot more of in the coming years.

Re:watts != Green

[bkr1_2k]

Of course it matters! No matter what the supply source is, less consumption means less production requirement, which means less pollution (no matter nuclear or coal) in the final numbers. Do we need a better standard for measurement? Sure, but that doesn't mean that this isn't a valid improvement.

Re:watts != Green

[gfxguy]

Reduced wattage is reduced wattage.... it's better to use only 10 watts, rather than 20, regardless of the source of your electricity. It's 10 versus 20 coal, but even 10 versus 20 nuclear can reduce demand on coal by another 10 watts.

You're being too cynical. Any reduction is beneficial and can result in less use of "dirtier" sources, even if you're not directly powered by them.

Re:watts != Green

[CheeseTroll]

However, Western Digital has zero control over how you generate electricity in your region. 10 watts saved is 10 watts saved, and the most efficient way to reduce the impact of power plants on the environment is to have fewer of them.

Re:watts != Green

[Hatta]

Since you don't get to choose how your power is generated, that's largely irrelevant. You do get to choose your hard drive though. If you choose one which uses 10W less power, whether your power is nuclear or coal, the environment (and your wallet) is that much better off.

Re:watts != Green

[stormy_petral]

The "but my electricity does not come from a coal plant" argument is moot. Every power plant's output gets pooled into the electric grid, http://www.eere.energy.gov/de/grid_architecture.html , so there's no real way to precisely account for where "my" electricity comes from.

Re:watts != Green

[edremy]

I know you're beiung funny, but in reality this doesn't matter. I built a PC back when I was in VA- my power provider was AEP, which is probably the worst polluter in the country- lots of old, dirty coal plants. I moved up to PA a month later- I'm in a electric co-op now, with 60% of the power being nuclear and 20% hydro, very little from coal.

Did the computer suddenly get more green just beacause I moved it north 200 miles?

Re:watts != Green

[Colonel Korn]

The device doesn't determine whether the power provided to it comes from coal or nuclear plants. Your local energy market does. There is no correlation between a choice of hard drive and power production methods. Accordingly, the power producer shouldn't be considered in this discussion.

Re:watts != Green

[xZgf6xHx2uhoAj9D]

First of all, Apple's devices are the only ones out there that produce smug. Measuring greenness based on smug output is unfair to Apple.

Secondly, what? The amount of power a device consumes and the source of the power are completely independent things. There's no reason for them to be considered in the same breath.

Re:watts != Green

[Anonymous Coward]

>"Eco-friendly or "green" products are becoming much more fashionable these days

In other words marketers have started using "eco" related bullshit and lies on the same old crap they've been selling for years.

Every time I see something marketed as "green" or "eco friendly" I want to shoot the bastards responsible.

Re:watts != Green

[bhima]

I don't really agree with that thinking.

Most folks can't control how the power that comes to home or business is generated but they can at least reduce what they consume.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.

Re:watts != Green

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

No thanks. What happens when you see the exclusive preview benchies of the latest OMGWTFBBQ-edition graphics cards and CPUs? ;)

Re:watts != Green

[Tangamandapiano]

Just keep in mind that the power sources in your country may be interconnected. For example, in the country where I live, most electricity comes from hydropower; however, if the demand grows too high at some period, the thermal power stations start working - and polluting.

Re:watts != Green

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, if you are serviced by Oklahoma Gas & Electric you can elect to pay extra for units of 100kWh blocks of wind power. See http://www.oge.com/es/wp/. It's nice that they offer, at least.

Re:watts != Green

[xZgf6xHx2uhoAj9D]

I agree with your sentiment, but it's not entirely accurate to say you don't get to choose how your power is generated. A lot of jurisdictions will allow you to pay a higher rate for power and the guarantee that the money goes to, for example, wind farms.

Re:watts != Green

[Anonymous Coward]

smug, not smog. He was trying to be funny by using an absurd measurement.

Re:watts != Green

[moderatorrater]

Wouldn't that give evangelical atheists a leg up? Or would smug superiority not convert?

Re:watts != Green

[Dr. Eggman]

Bingo, although I was trying to be make the entire post sound absurd. Looks like I fell short of the line between "disingenuously funny" and landed in "ingenuously stupid" instead.

Re:watts != Green

[russotto]

I agree with your sentiment, but it's not entirely accurate to say you don't get to choose how your power is generated. A lot of jurisdictions will allow you to pay a higher rate for power and the guarantee that the money goes to, for example, wind farms.

The electrons don't know you're paying more. The money may go to wind farms (or not -- money and electricity are both fungible) but the proportion of power (either yours or throughout the grid) generated by them changes not at all because you are paying more.

Re:watts != Green

[camperslo]

I know you're beiung funny, but in reality this doesn't matter. I built a PC back when I was in VA- my power provider was AEP, which is probably the worst polluter in the country- lots of old, dirty coal plants. I moved up to PA a month later- I'm in a electric co-op now, with 60% of the power being nuclear and 20% hydro, very little from coal.

Did the computer suddenly get more green just beacause I moved it north 200 miles?

No. It should make very little difference since things are interconnected. Unlike fossil-fuel plants, nukes don't cost much less to run when output is reduced. For that reason they tend to be run near full capacity. If a user getting power from the nuke uses less, the output of the fossil-fuel plants can be reduced. There are some other considerations such as the losses and maximum capacity of the transmission system. Issues with stability also become more significant with increasing distance when combining AC power from multiple generator sources.

I live near a coastal nuke plant, with warning sirens nearby and all that. An employee shared an interesting tidit with me when I asked him why we had regional outages so near the plant during statewide shortages. During times when my state has suffered power shortfalls, there were some "rotating" outages. What I didn't realize was that those of us near the plant were more likely to have power cut. Because most of us didn't need air conditioners and used the least lighting during summer, our use was generally below the baseline amount and billed at the lowest rates. Users in the hot inland areas were paying more per kwh due to being above baseline usage, so it was more profitable for their power to be kept on.

Since fossil-fuel power is generally used as a last resort, the percentage reduction in fossil fuel use (and carbon-dioxide/pollutants released) will be greater than the percentage reduction in total consumption. In other words, the efforts to reduce consumption actually help more than the raw numbers suggest.

Re:watts != Green

[Anonymous Coward]

Well sure, a smugness-powered computer would be great for Mac users, but PC users might find performance flagging a bit - they'd probably need an annoyance-powered machine, that ran on the stress-induced charge produced by waiting for all the little icons to appear in the system tray before the user can actually do anything. Gamers would probably need to enable Clippy to ensure regular top-ups of annoyance to keep their graphics cards humming away...

(Can you tell I own a Mac?)

vane?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe "not-as-vane-as-driving-a-1963-chrysler-turbine-car" would make more sense.

Re:vane?

[gEvil (beta)]

Maybe "not-as-vane-as-driving-a-1963-chrysler-turbine-car" would make more sense.

Yeah, the tails on those Chryslers from the 60s were pretty insane. Oh, did you guys mean vain?

Re:vane?

[Monkey]

Maybe they were referring to the vanes in the turbine?

86400 Watts*Hours

[gmthor]

So if i keep my HD on 24/7 then its saves me 86400 Watt*Hours. That's about 20 a Year. Not worth it for me.

Re:86400 Watts*Hours

[lazy-ninja]

Actually seeing as the drive only costs about $5 more than the previous/similar models, I would say it IS worth it. It is not worth it to run out and replace your drives, but if you are buying a new 500-1000gb drive I would say the savings is nice. Honestly, to me the specs on how bloody quiet these things are is the real selling point.

Recently reviewed...

[Ptur]

... by The Register: http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/03/26/review_four_terabyte_hard_drives/
Too bad they didn't include power and noise measurements for that Samsung drive :/

Re:Recently reviewed...

[Anonymous Coward]

Samsung Spinpoint T (and F1) are consistently quieter and cooler than even Seagate drives, given identical performance. However, Samsungs deliver better performance these days, as well. The only recent time Seagate surpassed them was with the 7200.11 (and its increased cache size) against the older T. Samsung caught back up with the F1.

I only recommend Seagate for the longer warranty these days. I personally have gone almost completely all-Samsung recently. I am constantly on the lookout for good deals on Seagate and WD, however, and would consider either as good alternatives if the price difference were to swing heavily in their favor against Samsung at any time that I needed new drives. However, I have been disappointed with both of them before (7200.8 owner here, as well as quite a few prematurely-failed, progressively louder WD drives from 1.6 GB to 160 GB over the years), so I think I'll keep favoring Samsungs for the near future, since their pricing seems to be in line with the others. OEM-only doesn't scare me, either, though it might be comforting to know that the others sell into retail channel.

Advertisements up

[nacturation]

Excellent news, my friend. Your advertisement of the power of summation are awe-inspiring! If I may be so bold as to continue your brazen line of reasoning, were you to find an additional 20W of power savings on top of your claimed 40W savings, you will have saved a grand total of 60W. Furthermore, though this is a difficult concept for the layman, if you introduce an additional 10W of savings, your total will now have reached 70W.

Just bought one

[robably]

Mine just arrived this morning (the 1TB Caviar model) and it is extremely quiet (I bought it for a Home Theatre PC). It brings home the point, though, that they may have made great strides in power savings and noise reduction, but the real hurdle with a 1TB drive is the time it takes to copy 1TB of data. I'm transferring everything across from my old 500GB drive via Firewire 400 and it's going to take a total of 7 hours. That's just to half-fill the drive.

Anyway, the article the summary seems to be slashdotted, so here's the review at TechReport I read before I ordered it, with lots of graphs and comparisons.

Re:Just bought one

[SIGBUS]

...the real hurdle with a 1TB drive is the time it takes to copy 1TB of data. I'm transferring everything across from my old 500GB drive via Firewire 400 and it's going to take a total of 7 hours. That's just to half-fill the drive.

It's coming to the point where eSATA is the only realistic solution for external drives. USB2 and FireWire 400 just don't cut it any more, and I haven't seen many systems supporting FireWire 800.

Re:Just bought one

[Hatta]

So start rsync before you go to bed and let it do its job. You've only got to fill it once.

Re:Just bought one

[jimicus]

It's coming to the point where eSATA is the only realistic solution for external drives. USB2 and FireWire 400 just don't cut it any more, and I haven't seen many systems supporting FireWire 800.


This won't necessarily help much. The transfer rates quoted for SATA are either burst rates (ie. how quickly it can shift data off the cache) or they assume you'll be doing practically zero seeking - which is true if you've got one large contiguous file but on a filesystem, the order you request files in could be all over the disk. NCQ helps here but at the end of the day, spending a lot of time seeking is the quickest, most efficient way to kill performance.

Re:Just bought one

[Firehed]

You say that as if it's specific to any one interface. Even the fastest hard drives out there couldn't sustain the potential throughput of SATA150 (let alone SATA-II/300), but if the filesystem or manual intervention keeps the disk relatively free of fragmentation (ideally at a folder/program level, not just file contiguity), it'll read quickly. And in that case, you'll be easily saturating a FW400/USB2.0 interface; at least for large files, as small files tend to read/write a lot more slowly simply from the system overhead.

Re:Just bought one

[moderatorrater]

I'm transferring everything across from my old 500GB drive via Firewire 400 and it's going to take a total of 7 hours That's just about right for going to sleep and waking up with it done. Unless you need to do it multiple times a week or it needs to be interactive for whatever reason, I don't see the problem. It took me about 4 hours to switch over to the new hard drives I bought last month, but after that I haven't had to spend more than 10 minutes copying files.

From a datacenter perspective

[Anonymous Coward]

... we're all going to convert to the Caviar line of drives and drop SCSI. And we'll replace the 8800GTX video cards running on each of our blades with more efficient 8600GTS cards. Global warming will slow down.

performance?

[Anonymous Coward]

does this have any impact on the drive's performace? if so, how much?

Re:performance?

[aquarajustin]

I have a friend with a 500GB WD GP drive. He uses the rig mostly for gaming, and is now sorry that he bought the WD drive. When he's playing FPSs, the drive spins down until it needs to access a certain texture or sound file. When the time comes to access that file from the drive, the game freezes for 1-3 seconds while the drive spins back up for access. It's painful. I don't play games on my computer, so having a GP drive wouldn't bother me.

Re:performance?

[Anonymous Coward]

the game freezes for 1-3 seconds while the drive spins back up for access...

In Linux the 'hdparm -S value' command could tweak the drive settings to either increase the spin-down timeout or turn it off completely. (Google 'man hdparm' for details).
I'm sure there must be an equivalent utility for Windows (assuming that's what he's running).

Re:performance?

[stokessd]

I know with non-green sata drives you can control spin-down period with S.M.A.R.T. tools like smartctl. If this drive is also SMART, he can probably change the spin-down time. So are these drives still SMART and can the "green-ness" be tuned this way?

Sheldon

Re:performance?

[aquarajustin]

Unfortunately, you can not control when the GP drives spin down with hdparm in Linux or the power settings in Windows.

just keep on dumping it in China

[tero]

It's great to see new technologies that are easier to recycle.

Now if U.S could just stop pretending and sign the Basel Convention deal which restricts the export of e-waste so the children of Guiyu wouldn't have to waste away their lives in toxic pits melting our "green" and ecologically "safe" drives.

Recycling is great, recycling it near the consumpition is also great. Dumping it to China is not great, out of sight out of mind mentality comes and bites you in the ass sooner or later.

Re:just keep on dumping it in China

[mh1997]

[Guyiu] City officials are proud of the e-waste industry but sensitive about its reputation as a dirty business that feeds off smuggled waste and abuses workers. Journalists who probe quickly find themselves detained by local thugs or police, and their digital photographs or video footage erased.

Local bosses pay little regard to workers' health or to regulations that prohibit dumping acid baths into rivers and venting toxic fumes...

...E-waste recyclers in the United States can't cover their costs with such low yields, especially while respecting environmental regulations...

It's the fault of the EPA, without environmental regulations, the USA could recycle the parts locally. Or maybe it's the fault of the Chineses government for not having environmental regulations.

Recycling e-waste is good except that it kills the workers, so throw the stuff in a landfill and waste resources and pollute the environment with materials that should be recycled.

Re:just keep on dumping it in China

[LunaticTippy]

I think dumping it to China would be perfect once China gets some decent environmental laws.

They send thousands of boats here full of stuff, why not send them back full of "raw materials?" It is cheaper to build stuff in China and ship it here, so it would be cheaper to ship stuff there for recycling.

Don't misunderstand me, I don't think we should support unsafe working or environmental conditions, just that empty boats aren't efficient.

Re:just keep on dumping it in China

[Just Some Guy]

Now if U.S could just stop pretending and sign the Basel Convention deal which restricts the export of e-waste so the children of Guiyu wouldn't have to waste away their lives in toxic pits melting our "green" and ecologically "safe" drives.

I'm unfamiliar with that so there I'm unclear on two things:

1. What are the stated reasons for America not complying with it?
2. What would those children be doing if they weren't mining our trash? I don't mean that to sound like I don't care, but is this the difference between food and starvation, or between a new boat for the parents and not having one?

Re:just keep on dumping it in China

[tero]

Answer to your question 1 is somewhat speculative, but this brief might give some insight (but as it's from the pro-Basel gang, so I guess it could be a bit biased):
http://olo.ban.org/Library/briefing2.html
Quote:

Since the beginning of the Basel negotiations, the United States has adopted the viewpoint of its industry lobby and not of its public as it strongly opposes the concept of a no-exceptions waste trade ban. The US, even as a non-Party, fought hard against passage of all of the above noted decisions. To date, the United States, in both Republican and Democrat administrations continues to tow the corporate line in opposition to the primary thrust that the Basel Convention has taken -- imposing an OECD to non-OECD hazardous waste trade ban with the aim of ending the practice of dumping hazardous wastes on poorer countries in avoidance of paying the high costs of more appropriate waste management or prevention in wealthier industrialized nations.

So I guess it would come down to corporate lobbying (not entirely surprising I guess).

As to your question 2, (for the "workers" at least) I'm almost sure it's more about getting your daily bread and butter on the table than getting that 3rd car and a boat. The latter option might be for the people in charge/running the operation.

...mean Much Lower Noise!

[StCredZero]

The Green Power drives are also impressively quiet! I've been looking for drives like this for years! This is perfect for those who want to build recording studio PCs, do lots of music production work, people building multimedia PCs, or those who just plain like quiet drives. You can even use a smaller SSD drive to get blazing random access performance just for games while using the Green Power for other purposes, and get the best of both worlds. (The Gigabyte iRam is spec'd perfectly for this, but it's a bit pricey.)

Re:...mean Much Lower Noise!

[CompMD]

Agreed, I purchased a pair of 1TB "green" drives from WD, and they are unbelievably silent when running. Which is good, because I knew that I had a bad drive when I suddenly heard horrendous noises emanate from one of them. :)

Re:...mean Much Lower Noise!

[asuffield]

This is perfect for those who want to build recording studio PCs, do lots of music production work

Anybody who is building a recording studio should know how to deal with the PCs: put them in the next room, on the other side of your acoustic insulation, and just bring the cables through. You need to do that anyway, so there's no point making them quieter.

Re:...mean Much Lower Noise!

[MrMacman2u]

Mod parent +1 for common sense.

Thanks for beating me to it!

Re:...mean Much Lower Noise!

[StCredZero]

Anybody who is building a recording studio should know how to deal with the PCs: put them in the next room, on the other side of your acoustic insulation, and just bring the cables through. You need to do that anyway, so there's no point making them quieter. Some of us are poor and really don't have a real pair of rooms for a real studio.

Re:...mean Much Lower Noise!

[cbreaker]

It doesn't take a big studio to put a computer in the next room, whatever that room might be. A closet, even. If you're doing it from home, chances are pretty f'ing good you have more than one room. A few extension cables and you're good.

Does being poor also make you stupid?

Re:...mean Much Lower Noise!

[FuturePastNow]

If you want the best of both worlds of a quiet drive and a fast drive, I recommend WD's new 640GB drive. I bought one a couple of weeks ago, and it's pretty nearly silent. It's also the fastest drive I've ever seen (without a Raptor or a SSD to compare it to).

Re:...mean Much Lower Noise!

[StCredZero]

No, some of us live in efficiencies. If your closet is small, then putting a PC in it is a pretty braindead idea. It seems like you don't know that you can build a machine that emits essentially 0 db. You can get a fanless power supply and passively cool a low power chip, which will be plenty for music recording purposes. This reduces you to one case fan, which can be undervolted and which will be completely inaudible. Many of the components for this are even fairly low-cost, like a CF to IDE adaptor for your boot partition.

Re:...mean Much Lower Noise!

[cbreaker]

Hmm, it seems like you have never used more for audio hardware than a Sound Blaster and a Microphone.

Your 0db machine would be hard pressed to handle 8 channel audio at 24-bit resolution from a Digi 002, which is extremely common hardware for a small home-based studio.

Give it a shot. Build your 0db low power fanless machine with flash memory, and see how fun it is to do anything audio besides listen to MP3's.

saving 10 watts!

[John Sokol]

I have found most drives run at around 12 watts, so saving 10 is really significant.
Also with less power the drives should run cooler, this would really increase drive reliability.

I found most CoLo servers don't properly cool their drives especially 1U servers, where it seems I loose a few every year, but at home I can run those same drives for 5 years or more. Even the desktop servers I run in a dusty shed that freeze in the winter and bakes in the summer the drives are more reliable then the ones running in a CoLo with constant 50 degree super clean air, just because drives in 1U's run hotter constantly and under a heaver load.

RoHS is another story, it's been a somewhat difficult transition, unexpectedly is make passing FCC compliance more difficult because for the exact same board layout it had higher RF emissions. Don't know why, wonder if others have also seen that.

I don't see how RoHS is going to be any more "green", the largest change is moving away from tin/lead to Lead-free solders that contain some mix of tin, copper, silver, bismuth, indium, zinc, and antimony.
It's more expensive, and brittle which could decrease reliablity.
If the circuit boards are actually getting recycled instead of landfilled, it wouldn't make much difference anyhow.

Re:saving 10 watts!

[Anonymous Coward]

Precisely. Everyone's focusing on how 10 watts isn't a lot, but if you look at how much hard drives consume then it becomes somewhat of an accomplishment to save those 10 watts.

Re:saving 10 watts!

[MarkEst1973]

According to the Energy Infomration Administration, there are 107 million households in the US. The end-use consumption of electricity by household shows 318 kWh (kilowatt hours) used for a dekstop PC on average per household. There is, unfortunately, no breakdown of the electricity consumption per component in the PC, so I'm left to wonder how much is used by the hard drive specifically.

Profiling your code proves the 80/20 rule is correct. Your program spends 80% of its CPU time in 20% of the code. You would use a profiler to find the real meaty bottlenecks, right? As opposed to guessing where the bottlenecks are. Likewise, if we want to reduce electricity consumption, we're better off using data to guide us. Air conditioning, heating, and major appliances use by far the largest amount of electricity in your average household.

Still, it looks like this site will have to add hard drives to their saved watts: http://www.whosavedwatt.com/

Re:saving 10 watts!

[Bert64]

Well, i would suggest you buy better quality servers to colo...
I have seen the cheap nasty garbage some people put into datacenters, poor cooling, poor airflow design (like a 1u case where the fan on the cpu can blow to either side (heating the northbridge or the psu), but not backwards (out through the vents).
If you stick with high quality servers, there's usually much less of a problem. I have some HP DL145 systems for instance, and the drives in them run quite cool and have a steady flow of air over them.

Be wary of colo centers where you rent a server, they will typically use the cheapest crap they can find since you'll never see it. Best to supply your own hardware, or find out exactly what the colo company is supplying.

Re:saving 10 watts!

[trainderailment]

Do you have any references to the FCC problems with RoHS? I've never heard of this. Millions of products are now compliant, so I'm curious where you get your information on a difficult transition. Manufacturers like Motorola are now reporting that with the new solder formulations, they've gone to higher densities allowing smaller wireless phones, for example, with *increased* reliability - see the Wikipedia article. As for heavy metals, I'll take the most popular formulations -- tin, silver, bismuth over lead in our landfills any day. :)

Re:saving 10 watts!

[Anonymous Coward]

I think, more to the point, is that the vendors are actively attempting,
on a serious level, to go green. Apparently, to some of the Slashdotters
in here, it's not a significant difference. 10W is 11% of the output of
my laptop's power supply. Whatever...

Point is, it's a START. Maybe next year, they'll come up with a drive
that uses 20% less power, and so on and so on. If we all bitch and complain
about today's 10% reduction, the manufacturers won't feel they have an
incentive to pour more money and time developing "greener" drives.

And, furthermore, the manufacturers will be able to get firmer data on what
greening techniques work (in terms of maintaining long-term reliability)
and what might not, and refine their manufacturing techniques for the new
technologies involved. Large customers will probably be looking to replace
some number of drives next year anyway as capacities and speed increase and
as older, slower drives become obsolete (and their reliability starts to
approach the far end of the bathtub curve). So, hopefully, those customers
will be able to actually reduce the power consumed by their drives AND
eventually by their HVAC systems as well. It will be a slow, iterative process,
but it appears we're off to a good start.

Patience, grasshoppers...

Re:saving 10 watts!

[tji]

To me, 10 Watts seems like a huge savings for a hard drive.

But, if you look at the article, the savings they claimed were more like 5-6 Watts. That is still quite a large savings from a hard drive, but it's not 10W. Maybe compared to the highest power usage drive, like a 15K RPM drive the savings may be 10 Watts.

The article in silentpcreview.com put these green WD drives at about 7.5 Watts, and the highest of the other quiet drives was 11.6 Watts. Quite a huge improvement.

As a long time HTPC user, these drives are perfect for my uses. HUGE capacity, whisper quiet operation, and low power/heat -- leading to easier cooling of the system and fewer fans. The performance of these drives may be a bit lower than other drives, but I have been using a USB 2.0 connected 320GB laptop hard drive as the primary storage for my MythTV DVR, and that keeps up fine recording 2 HD streams while playing a third. So, the performance of this drive should be a non-issue.

Re:saving 10 watts!

[mrand]

Not to mention Pb-free seems to greatly increase tin whisker problems. We need new materials quickly, because a meaningful percentage of the boards being produced right now are going to be dead in a few years.

For more info:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21151552/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisker_(metallurgy)
and of course, just to save someone a bit of typing or extra mouse click:
http://www.google.com/search?q=tin+whiskers

      Marc

Re:saving 10 watts!

[Anonymous Coward]

I have found most drives run at around 12 watts, so saving 10 is really significant.

My web server (no link there it will not stand the /. effect) is using less than 20 watt. This includes the CPU etc (slug) and the (external USB) harddisk. OK, the system is not super fast but handles my daily load without any problems. And I am only consuming 10% of the electricity of a normal PC. Saving a few watt on the hard disk is definitely a huge saving for this configuration.

Re:saving 10 watts!

[trainderailment]

The tin-whiskers problem is not new and solutions are available. The doom and gloom of problems has been forecast for years, but as I mentioned in an earlier post, millions of products have been on the market for years without problems. Check out the benefits and multiple references: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROHS

Re:saving 10 watts!

[John Sokol]

Sure if I wanted to spend 3K instead of 1K on my server. New drives are $100 each. It's just darn inconvenient.

Re:saving 10 watts!

[rubah]

I have to imagine the power usage of computers has only increased since 2001 with increased processing power and more gadegety peripherals hanging around.

Re:saving 10 watts!

[John Sokol]

power usage of computers has only increased since 2001 Actually that hasn't been the case, which has also been a surprise.

Manufacturers hit a wall on 100 watts CPU's were the heat sinks became too heavy to mount on the PCB.
And even though there are alternative solutions for some reason they just set that as the limit for desk top CPU's.

So all systems since 2000 and maybe even earlier have had about the same power consumption peak and idle.

What has happened is they lower the voltage on the CPU while increasing clock rates, and density.
In the end it keeps the power consumption at about the same level.

This was something I found frustrating since with improved cooling they could increase power levels and run processors even faster, but if you notice the P4 hit 3.8 Ghz in 2004 and they just stopped flat.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,118424-page,1/article.html 2004 they changed there tune.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EKF/is_44_48/ai_93735204 2002 planning 5 & 6 Ghz

Yet overclockers make it to 6 Ghz with P4's as early as 2004.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eSwf5LxGAM
&
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/26/0019229&tid=222&tid=118&tid=164&tid=1

Wrong Standard?

[Sponge Bath]

...disposal of these products is being regulated now by such things as the RoHS compliance standard

RoHS says which materials can be used in construction, WEEE covers disposal. (In the EU at least)

Re:Wrong Standard?

[AioKits]

WEEE would like to play!

Hey dumbass

[Anonymous Coward]

No one "dumps" anything there you fucking twat, THEY BUY THE WASTE EXPRESSLY FOR THE PURPOSES OF RECYCLING IT.

It's pretty fucking retarded to blame me because someone else CHOSE to buy my leftovers to make a buck.

You're a moron.

Re:Hey dumbass

[tero]

Great attitude buddy. So as long as someone takes it off your hands (and you can make a buck!) you don't need to know where the waste goes? Makes me really believe in future of mankind. Good stuff.

Now open your eyes and start acting responsibly, recycle your own waste in U.S and stop dumping/selling it around the world.

Re:Hey dumbass

[moderatorrater]

Great attitude buddy. As long as there's a crying baby in there and the chance that someone could get hurt, we shouldn't allow someone the freedom to choose. Makes me really believe in the future of democracy. Good stuff.

Now open your eyes and start acting logically, recycling your own waste to places that can use it, where the recycled material is closer to the place that it's going to be used and invigorates an economy that will ultimately help more people than the US has held in its entire history.

Re:Hey dumbass

[thelexx]

So just because someone is desperate enough to be willing to do something deadly (read the fucking article, dudes are identifying plastic by smell when it burns ffs), it should not only be allowed, as the Chinese government is doing(tacitly), but further taken advantage of by outsiders under the guise of 'democracy'? Please inform me of your other cunning plans which cannot fail.

Re:Yoda

[etymxris]

No, they have a pretty average failure rate actually. Check the newegg reviews for the 750GB model. I just got burned on mine. It lasted four days and then went kaput. Time to RMA.

Mar 26 09:36:31 opteron kernel: Buffer I/O error on device sdg1, logical block 5912
Mar 26 09:36:36 opteron kernel: printk: 1579 messages suppressed.

Not sure how true it is, but some people are saying these drives are just binned 7200rpms that didn't make the cut. In any case, it seems clear that these drives are actually 5400rpm, not some variable speed between 7200rpm and 5400rpm.

Apple smugnessitude

[chaim79]

Of the six computers in Apple's lineup 3 have Firewire 800 ports (Macbook Pro, iMac, and Mac Pro's even have 2), I already have a couple external drives that use Firewire 800 (500gb and 320gb). I haven't looked at other manufacturers (for the simple reason that I don't care) but Apple seems to be pushing it forward. And those FW800 drives are nice, the gb's just fly by. :)

The earth is worth it!

[flithm]

It's also important to point out that just because it only saves a single user 10 watts, that doesn't mean it's not a worthwhile endeavor. The post text suggests that this could add up for datacenters, but datacenters are nothing compared to the number of home computers our there, just imagine the impact on our global electricity infrastructure if every single computer's power consumption dropped by 10 watts. That's huge! Then think about the impact that would have on the environment (ie using less non-renewable resources). I think it would surely be noticed.

So yeah it's unrealistic to believe that every person is going to swap out their drives to use these, but when thinking about environmental issues it's important to put yourself in that frame of mind. I try do what I wish everyone would do. If everyone thought that way we'd get there eventually.

That being said I'm not going to swap out all my drives for these babies, but next time I need to buy or replace a drive, yeah for sure I'll cough up a little extra cash. As long as it's not just a marketing gimmick, and the price increase isn't too much, I'd be willing to take a slight loss on the principal alone. It's not just our pocket books that needs protecting.

But, as someone pointed out already, these drives are only a few bucks more than their non-green counterparts, so not only will they eventually save some cash, but they have the ability to make a difference too.

As a final thought, another thing that's important is make a point with manufacturers (through your wallet) that environmental issues matter. The more we think about it, and the more we get in the habit of making the small choices that all add up to a larger statement, the better off we all are.

Re:The earth is worth it!

[BlackPignouf]

I globally agree with you.

But whatever we improve, IT still represents an ecological disaster.
Take a look at every tech stuff around you. Where will they be in 5 years? Surely not around anymore!

Obviously, those "green drives" are better than nothing, but in some years, nobody will want to use any 1TB hard drive anymore, and this improvement in power consumption only took place because millions of hard drive have been produced.
Just like for cars, we reduce the environmental impact of each product separately thanks to economies of scale, but what really matters is the global impact. And it sadly just keeps growing.

Performance

[gravis777]

FTA:

A very interesting feature of the GreenPower drives is IntelliPower, which is a "fine-tuned balance of spin speed, transfer rate, and caching algorithms designed to deliver both significant power savings and solid performance" according to WD. What this means to potential users is that WD isn't telling us the exact spindle speed of these drives. We know that they are likely spinning at a speed between 5400 and 7200 RPM and that each GreenPower model may use a different, invariable RPM. So, while WD made power the priority with the GreenPower platform, it did so without disregarding solid performance, a wise choice in our opinion. That was my number one concern. If I am putting these in a data center, I would be a lot more worried about drive performance over how much power it consumes. However, if it consumes less power while offering the same performance, I am all for it.

Re:Performance

[mcvos]

IntelliPower is a complex way for WD to act mysterious about the drive's actual rotation speed. So here's the facts as I've found them on various forums and review sites:

The SE16 GP rotates at 5400 rpm, the RE2 GP rotates at 7200 rpm. WD doesn't want to tell us this because lots of people think that 5400 rpm means it's slow. It's not. The SE16 GP performs like an average 7200 rpm drive (better than a 1TB Seagate, for example), and you're unlikely to really notice the performance difference with the real top-performers. And it uses less than half the power and makes only a fraction of the noise.

What I don't know is how well the RE2 GP performs, but if it's practically identical, except for the higher rotation speed, I'd expect it to have spectacular performance. Not that you'd notice that performance in normal circumstances, but if lots of rapid disk actions really is that important to you, the RE2 is probably a very good choice. For anyone else, the SE16 GP is a brilliant choice.

Great Summery Grammar...

[aitikin]

...by being the first drive manufacture to produce and market a lower power version of their Caviar line of hard drives.

It'd be a good trick for another manufacturer to produce and market a lower power version of the Caviar, seeing as that's a WD TM...

Re:Great Summery Grammar...

[stormguard2099]

Summery looks like two preview buttons are broken

Re:Great Summery Grammar...

[Vegeta99]

Perhaps he is postulating that as we get closer to the summer months, grammar takes a dive due to the multitude of high-school armchair EEs and computer scientists getting the school blues?

Review at the register: Not so good.

[amcdiarmid]

The Register reviewed four 1Tb drives, including this one.
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/03/26/review_four_terabyte_hard_drives/

Product

Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000
Verdict

The Hitachi set a decent benchmark for performance as a standalone drive.
Rating

70%
Suggested Price

£159
Product

Samsung SpinPoint F1 HD103UJ
Verdict

It's a straight fight between the Seagate and Samsung, and on balance we favour the Sammy despite its higher price.
Rating

85%
Suggested Price

£194
Product

Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31000340NS
Verdict

The Seagate delivers sterling performance with the minimum of fuss, yet it is the cheapest of the drives on test.
Rating

80%
Suggested Price

£149
Product

Western Digital WD1000FYPS RE2-GP
Verdict

We're all in favour of reducing our dependence on electricity but the RE2-GP lagged behind in every one of our tests.
Rating

60%
Suggested Price

£159

Re:Review at the register: Not so good.

[MrNemesis]

I guess it depends on your requirements. I have two 1TB GP's that I use for media storage; in sequential copies (i.e. copying my data on to the drive in the first place) they averaged 50-60MB/s, with the preceding drive (a WD 750GB AAKS) managed more like 55-62MB/s when I initially loaded it up. That's the only tim eI've ever maxed out this drive, as even recording three DVB streams to it and watching two from it simultaneously keeps it barely ticking over.

As noted, it's byt far the quietest and coolest drive I've ever used, aprticularly when seeking. I'm prepared to wait an extra half hour in an eight hour rsync job if that's the case. It's just a case of priorities; fast, quiet, cheap. Pick any two. Balls to the wall performance has never been the be-all and end-all for any component in the consumer arena IME.

Re:Review at the register: Not so good.

[amcdiarmid]

Fair point on requirements: Right now, my need is for hosting about 20 windows server instances to a VMware cluster with two teamed Gb NIC's each. (OK, I'm looking at adding more NICS to both the share, and the servers...)

If I was just using these to store backups of movies, then the power/heat savings would be dandy. I just happen to be screwed by worries of sustained thrashing.

Re:Review at the register: Not so good.

[MrNemesis]

If it's a VMWare box, I imagine nothing less than RAIDed 10/15k SAS drives will do - our main ESX cluster at work is six IBM x3850's, each with a bunch of 300GB 10k SAS drives in RAID10 for the system drives, and for storage a fibre LUN's into the SAN. Which, oddly enough, is packed to the gunnels with ~100TB worth of cheap, poorly performing SATA discs much like the WD one :)

In essence, the perfect combination - a few expensive, high performance drives where performance really matters (yep, we have DB servers running in VM's because of the HA aspect) hooked into bigger and cheaper drives where the prime motivator is large scale, economical storage.

Sustained thrashing is a fact of life when you're talking about large scale virtual environments, especially where thrash-happy windows is concerned. Where's my HKLM/System/CurrentControlSet/ YouveGotSixteenFuckingGigsOfRamYouRetardedMachine WhyInTheNameOfCrapperoonyAreYouSwapping registry key?

Edit: damn lameness filter. Can't I have a "allow me to post transparently ficticious registry keys" checkbox in my profile? Sheesh.

Oxidized copper?

[Anonymous Coward]

I just love that Statue-Of-Liberty patina on my circuit board!

Great for a Tivo

[Bodhammer]

I put a 750GB in my TivoHD not so much for the power savings but the noise reduction. I cannot hear the drive from 1'. It is fast enough for two HD streams. the power savings is nice as it is running 24x7 in the living room. My only complaint is they are only a 3-year warranty whereas Seagate is 5-year. I put it on my AMEX so I get one extra year. Drive was inexpensive at $150 from NewEgg.

I really have no complaints.

Dead drives are the greenest.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen a way higher % of WD drives fail in the first year compared to most other brands.

(altho seagate and maxtor are a close second for failing)

Not running at all sure saves alot of power.

for datacenters?

[dropadrop]

Yes, these drives certainly work well in some regards. However the article talks about datacenters, and I can hardly think of lots of uses for 5400rpm drives in "my" datacenter. Already with 500GB sata drives / 300GB FC I'm running out of IOPS far before space... Well maby for SAN replication?

Re:Whenever you hear the word "green" ...

[Pavan_Gupta]

False.

"Green" not "Competing with Sandisk"

[SlappyBastard]

Repeat it... that has nothing to do with Sandisk's rise. Nothing. Ever, ever, ever, never nothing ever. OK? Got it. Like trees. Not laptops. Not data centers. Green. Dig? Got it? Sure.

Jumpers put to use

[Hyppy]

That's a nice use of jumpers. Maybe I haven't messed with consumer-level HDDs in a while, but this is the first I've seen of jumpers that control something besides Master/Slave/Cable Select. Not like SATA drives ever had a use for that, but still.

FTA:

The close-up of the label above shows you the three jumper settings: jumpering pins 1 and 2 enables SSC (Spread Spectrum Clocking), jumpering pins 3 and 4 enables PUIS (Power Up In Standby), and jumpering pins 5 and 6 enables 1.5GB PHY.

Summery?

[Anonymous Coward]

As in "of, like, or appropriate for summer?"

Ancient news

[Anonymous Coward]

These drives came out something like 9 months ago, to meet Energy Star 4.0 requirements of average power consumption under 7 watts. How is this even close to news?

Even older technologies are eating less power...

[electrictroy]

GE has developed an incandescent "60 watt" bulb that only uses 30 watts. They are trying to create one that only uses 15 watts.

Such a bulb would have the same efficiency as a compact flourescent light, but with the "instant on" advantages of incandescents and no poisonous mercury to clean up if the bulb accidently breaks.

DiskCompare.com shows them to be a good value too

[barryp]

DiskCompare.com is a good place to check out how these drives rate in terms of value. The Caviar GP WD10EACS is currently at 4.35 GB/$ (newegg prices), the sweet spot though for the Caviar GP Family (and for most other brands too) is the 750GB size, with the WD7500AACS coming in at 5.35 GB/$

Actually

[fo0bar]

It's closer to 10.24W per drive, but you know the hard drive industry and their "marketing watt" definition...

I put 4 of these drives in a readynas

[Anonymous Coward]

Much quieter and is running 15 degrees cooler. Because they generate less heat in the case, the case fans run slower and quieter too.

As far as wide spread use of these things? I think that over 1,000,000 households this summer, not producing 10,000,000 watts of heat and then having an air conditioner removed those 10,000,000 watts of heat could be enough to reduce demand across a power grid. 68,266,667 BTU's saved overall.

But it is more important to go around reducing phantom loads on everything. Put all your power adapters on a power strip and turn off the strip when you aren't using them to recharge or run something would have as big or bigger of an impact than low powered drives, for far less cost as well.

The ultimate green tech idea

[heroine]

The killer green tech idea is Basket Weaving Technology (BASKET). Basket Weaving Technology saves the environment by weaving baskets with 10 less pieces of basket weave. You need to buy BASKET before this new GREEN TECHNOLOGY takes off.

Re:Even older technologies are eating less power..

[LunaticTippy]

Do you have a link?

Typically thinner filaments are more efficient but more fragile. If they developed a filament material that is less fragile and thinner it would be a serious breakthrough.

Simpler solution:

[hummassa]

Copy the whole disk and then resize the partitions; don't do it via USB/FW, but via SATA bus.
1. plug both HDs;
2. boot from a linux livecd,

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=1M

3. after that,

parted /dev/sdb

4. ??/profit!!. I suppose it will get more than 71GB/hour transferred.

Don't your friend know...

[hummassa]

That you can control how often the drive spins down in the "power" control panel for XP?

Re:Don't your friend know...

[aquarajustin]

Well, my friend certainly knows a couple of things:
1. How to use better grammar than you.
2. Not to assume the operating systems that others are using.
3. That again, the spin down time for the GP drives can not be controlled by the user (short of writing a script that pings your hard drive every 30 seconds).

Feel free to mod me down -1, Insolent

Drive speed

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see mention of it but these drives are only 5400RPM which will make a big difference in a data center environment.

Measure it yourself

[mmontour]

In any case, it seems clear that these drives are actually 5400rpm, not some variable speed between 7200rpm and 5400rpm. I have written a small program to measure a drive's RPM - http://members.shaw.ca/mmontour/rpmtest.c. It confirms that my 1TB Western Digital GP drive is running at 5400 RPM.

Typical WD

[vision864]

This is classic of this company tech wise they have *Nothing* when their entry into the server market failed miserably they called it a raptor gaming drive, When they couldn't make a 1 Tb 7200rpm drive they slow it to 5400 and call it a green power, I really don't know how they've got by bluffing for so many damn years. tech wise they've always been at least 2 years behind in density, even against the likes of Fujitsu and samsung.

Even better...

[FranTaylor]

Use one of the new Hitachi 7200 rpm TravelStar notebook drives. Desktop-like performance, and only TWO watts average consumption.

Re:Even older technologies are eating less power..

[severoon]

Who decided the standard amount of light output by a certain wattage? Cuz whoever it was was apparently wrong.

Breakdown of PC power usage

[John Sokol]

At my now dead startup Nisvara we where building Silent computers using passive cooling, and figure out how to build server rooms that didn't require air conditioning just outside evaporative cooling towers.

We did this very profiling, out designed cooled each component individually.
I dont' have the numbers in front of me, but if I recall for a typical P4 3Ghz system we saw the total average power consumption at something like 75 watts when idle and 150 watts or more under load. With the ACPI on it would drop considerably when idle. (I am not including the monitors that also draw 75 watts or so)

Again we were more interested in were heat was generated so we measured power dissipation per component which is directly equivalent to watts used.
  But watts for a component was quite different then the watts on the power line.

Why? Because in this breakdown almost 40 to 50% of the power was lost in PC's power supply's!
Both main and on the motherboards on board supply's needed for the CPU and chip sets.
This was very high since most PC power supply were only 60% efficient!
So all loaded inside the PC show up as almost 2x on the 110 volt power line.

So of the peak 150W coming in what's left after being stepped down is a remaining 80W or so.

Hard Drive 12 watts assuming 1 80Gb Maxtor DiamondMax.
North and South Bridge, 1 to 6 watts
Support chips, almost 1 maybe 2 watts, things like the NIC and other support components were insignificant.

CPU which could vary from 20 watts to 100 watts depending on it's load.
  Running like CPU burn, CPU test or CPU stress would max out the CPU's power, again with the power supply low efficiency an 80 watt increase in CPU power use results in an 160 Watt increase on the 110V power line! We didn't not expect this when we started.

If you add a high end graphics (Nvidia/ATI) card then add on another 40 watts 2x so 80 watts on the power line.

Another interesting thing was 10 watts for fans!

Here is another shocker, the hotter the system ran the more power each component draw. This could add another 10% or so. So a cold system like just after power up uses less then a hot one.

>Still, it looks like this site will have to add hard drives to their saved watts: http://www.whosavedwatt.com/
"And Bill saved 2,000,000 Watts by changing his indoor growing operation to LED lighting." Joking.
;) Sorry just couldn't resist after reading that site.

RoHS

[John Sokol]

The FCC RF emission problems is first hand experience from product development I am working on.

There are no published references and since we are not paid for science no effort was spent to tracking down the cause.
A design that was already shipping with standard tin/lead consistently failed RF emissions testing after a RoHS manufacturing.
This required us to shield the cases and re-route signals differently from the earlier non-RoHS design that did pass earlier with an unshielded case.
I understand "technically" the RoHS board design shouldn't have needed any board changes but in practice this was not the case.

Not sure what the typical experience is.

Hard drive: good. Review: Not so good.

[Anonymous Coward]

The Register's testing method (copy 3GB from/to drive) is questionable at best. The drive has been reviewed elsewhere more comprehensively, with a not so one-dimensional result.

Re:Even older technologies are eating less power..

[drinkypoo]

I don't know what you think a thinner filament has anything to do with it. IIRC The lamp reflects infrared and/or UV produced back to the filament, producing heat. Resistance is controlled by heating, so the resistance rises and the electrical power consumption drops. Or so I imagine. But I'm sure about reflecting non-visible light back to the source. The majority of electricity going into an incandescent lamp is wasted, assuming you don't need the heat.

Heat == Noise

[bill_mcgonigle]

You get a HD with 10W less power need, a northbridge with 5W less power need, a CPU with 5W less power need, a video card with 15W less power need, a soundcard with 5W less power need, you've saved 40W already with minimal change in performance.

And you can start to use slower fans too. It's funny this came out right now - I'm in the process of designing a quiet 1U server, so I can run it in my office but not sacrifice too much performance. I'm finding that it's all about fan noise, and that's a function of how much you have to cool. So if these drives take 10W out of my RAID-1 budget, I'm buying WD for the first time in 5 years.

(Oh, and if anybody has any better ideas than a passively cooled e8200, lemme know).

heat isn't so bad

[adpowers]

the drives are more reliable then the ones running in a CoLo with constant 50 degree super clean air, just because drives in 1U's run hotter constantly and under a heaver load. Heat isn't necessarily so bad. From Google's research on hard disk failure trends [PDF]:

The figure shows that failures do not increase when the average temperature increases. In fact, there is a clear trend showing that lower temperatures are associated with higher failure rates. Only at very high temperatures is there a slight reversal of this trend.

4x

[Anonymous Coward]

I put four of the WD 1TB WD10EACS drives in a Tyan 1U server with an Opteron 146. I measured the power with my Kill-A-Watt before and after. It was replacing four 400GB Seagate drives. Raw numbers were 9.10kWh in 73 hours 14 minutes before, and 6.74kWh in 58 hours 34 minutes. That's 2.982 kWh per day with the old drives and 2.762 kWh per day with the new drives. At our rate of 6.9 cents / kWh (non-data center, North Texas wholesale big-consumption company rate), that's $5.54 savings per year. I assume other 1TB drives use more power than the 400GB drives replaced, so apples-to-apples numbers might be higher. Just throwing out my experience. I like the drives - I got 31MB[ytes]/sec writing on a 5.8GB file sustained in an external enclosure using eSATA.

10W is a lot today

[Trogre]

When my Core 2 Duo E4600 box draws 58 Watts at idle (80 when working hard), a 10W power saving is not insignificant.

Okay so it will only save about $15/year, but it also means the hard disk isn't going to get as hot, and we don't need to move as much air to keep the hard drive cool. That can't be too bad for hard drive longevity either.

Re:Even older technologies are eating less power..

[Doggabone]

I haven't read this fully.
http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/ge/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20070223005120&newsLang=en&ndmConfigId=1001109&vnsId=681

Also ...
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-an-hei-bulb.htm

bah

[Khashishi]

10 watts less operating power. Wooptie doo. What I want to know is, how much less resources are used in production, and how much greener are the waste products.

Apple TV power consumption and +1 on Kill-A-Watt

[cwerdna]

I have a Kill-A-Watt and love it. It's a great gadget. People who just throw around wild guesses about power consumption (w/o actually measuring, esp. of their own devices help spread misinformation.

From http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=296699, the Apple TV seems to draw 17-22 watts. http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=4408276#4408276 says that it's 13.8 to 19 watts.

10 watts less heat

[jridley]

Heat in the PC is a serious issue. 10 watts less draw by the hard drive is 10 watts less heat in the hard drive. That's significant in the life expectancy of the drive.

I bought one of the WD green line (750G) as a NAS drive (hosted on my MythTV box). SMART reports that the drive's temperature is only about 5 degrees above the ambient temperature in the case, while the other drives run about 12 to 15 degrees warmer. I have no special cooling on the drives, they're just sitting in a normal cheap PC case with no fans or heat sinks on the drives themselves. They are NOT sitting right next to one another though, I don't do that unless I have to.

Re:Even older technologies are eating less power..

[LunaticTippy]

Thanks for the links. It is frustrating that nobody is providing details about the development.

Would you care to explain, OT, of course...

[hummassa]

1. what were the grammar mistakes I did? (english is not my first language) I really don't understand why the attacks, if I am only trying to help.
2. I used XP as an example. hdparm/sdparm also works on Linux, and I'm sure MacOSX has something like that also.
3. That one is a tough one to believe; have your friend tried to disable APM in the BIOS? This says it could be that.

Re:Would you care to explain, OT, of course...

[aquarajustin]

1. You said "Don't your friend know." It should be "Doesn't your friend know?" 2. Okay 3. The power saving on the GP drives operates independently of APM and ACPI.

Re:We've heard that before.

[WindShadow]

Don't forget that this is a double saving since the saving A/C capacity must be added. Commercial A/C has an EGR of 6-12, so typically this would be at least one more watt saved in not having to get rid of the heat you didn't create.

For the forgetful, watt=3.4BTU/hr, so each drive saves ~35BTU/hr. Particularly in an office that could be significant.

Or course I expect to see flash replace disk in my lifetime, but then we thought that about bubble memory.