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."

SSD power consumption ?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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 [wikipedia.org] deal which restricts the export of e-waste so the children of Guiyu [wikipedia.org] wouldn't have to waste away their lives [nwsource.com] 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 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: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: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.

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.

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.