Hitachi Releases World's Most Energy-Efficient HDD

An anonymous reader writes "Today Hitachi released what they are calling the 'world's most energy efficient desktop hard drive' capable of reducing the active and idle power consumption by up to 40 percent over the previous generation." The drive will come in a range of flavors starting at 250GB and ranging to 500GB. Hitachi is promising these drives in high volume later this year.

This might be interesting for large arrays...

[Gordo_1]

but for most desktops and servers, at 6-8 watts idle and 10-12 watts when actively seeking, HDD power consumption typically represents 5% or less of the overall power consumption of a modern system. Good PR for Hitachi though.

Silent

[owlstead]

It's not very noisy either, although it won't match silent 2,5 " drives by a long shot. So it's not that great for fan-less systems and all that.

This range of drives:

2.6/2.8 dB typical idle acoustics

WD Scorpio (pretty silent 2,5 " HDD @ 5400 rpm):

2.0 typical idle acoustics

Re:Would it make a difference in desktop machines?

[Quadraginta]

I would have thought that PSUs draw a constant amount.

Goodness, no. The current the power supply draws from the wall varies with the amount of power it's being asked to supply. You can easily verify this yourself by noticing how much hotter your laptop gets when you're making it do a lot of work. The heat it puts out is the final form of the energy the power supply draws from the wall (or the battery).

WD's got one too.

[eddy]

WD's got one in their series named for german scheisse-pr0n: Caviar GP [techreport.com]. 4W idle, capacities up to 1TB.

Re:Power consumption of a hard drive == ???

[soldack]

My bet is that solid state drives do much better. Moving parts consume a lot of power.
http://news.digitaltrends.com/news/story/12556/samsung_announces_64_gb_solid_state_drive [digitaltrends.com]
"...consumes just half a Watt when operating (one tenth of a Watt when idle)"

vs. from the article:

"Through a 40-percent power reduction, Hitachi GST has delivered unmatched idle power utilization of 3.6 watts on the 250GB capacity model and 4.8 watts on models with capacities of 320GB or greater. Similarly, the P7K500 has reduced its active power requirements to 6.4 watts and 8.2 watts for its one- and two-disk models, respectively. By utilizing roughly half the 7 watts of idle power typically allocated for hard drives..."

People don't even read the SUMMARIES any more ...

[trolltalk.com]

Lets go back to what I originally stated - that these drives are probably NOT for data centers.

From the summary of TFA:

> "Today Hitachi released what they are calling the 'world's most energy efficient desktop hard drive'

These are probably NEVER going to go into data centers, at least not under any sort of warranty.

Re:Three obvious things

[monsted]

SAS for the win.

Now if only they'd all worked together and stuck with one serial standard instead of two very slightly different ones so we wouldn't have cheap SATA (that won't work with the good drives) and expensive SATA+SAS controllers...

I want a couple of SAS (well, faster 10k) drives for my OS and SATA (well, slower, high capacity)drives for my bulk data, using one of the cheapish controllers...

The whole distinction between SATA and SAS is silly anyway, since the interface makes little difference. We had the possibility of getting rid of that stupid "SCSI drives are better than IDE" notion once and for all, making way for interchangable drives of varying prices, qualities and speeds, all using the same interface, but someone blew it... again. SATA just shouldn't exist, really.

Please, storage vendors, kill SATA. Quickly, before it's too late.