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

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

[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.

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

[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

[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.

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: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.

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.

...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: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.

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: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: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.

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.