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."

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 [silentpcreview.com]

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.

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 [techreport.com] I read before I ordered it, with lots of graphs and comparisons.

...mean Much Lower Noise!

[StCredZero]

The Green Power drives are also impressively quiet! [avsforum.com] 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: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:They're also very quiet

[MrLogic17]

for example in a redundant RAID array

Redundant RAID? Redundant.

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/ [reghardware.co.uk]

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

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.

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 [amazon.com] (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: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: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.