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Data Storage Power

Western Digital's "Green" Hard Drives 187

Posted by CmdrTaco from the not-as-vain-as-driving-a-prius dept.
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."
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Western Digital's "Green" Hard Drives More

Western Digital's "Green" Hard Drives

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  • SSD power consumption ? (Score:2, Interesting)

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

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Brian Gordon ( 987471 )
      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: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Disoculated ( 534967 )
        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.
    • 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.

      • 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.
        • 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.

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

    • 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.

  • They're also very quiet (Score:5, Informative)

    by A Friendly Troll ( 1017492 ) on Wednesday March 26, 2008 @08:01AM (#22868228)
    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.

    • Re:They're also very quiet (Score:5, Interesting)

      by myxiplx ( 906307 ) on Wednesday March 26, 2008 @08:53AM (#22868708)
      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.
      • 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: (Score:2)

          by myxiplx ( 906307 )
          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

      • Re:They're also very quiet (Score:4, Informative)

        by TeamSPAM ( 166583 ) <flynnmj&gmail,com> on Wednesday March 26, 2008 @11:57AM (#22870870) Homepage

        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: (Score:2, Informative)

      by MrLogic17 ( 233498 )

      for example in a redundant RAID array


      Redundant RAID? Redundant.

  • Ads up (Score:5, Insightful)

    by downix ( 84795 ) on Wednesday March 26, 2008 @08:01AM (#22868230) Homepage
    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.

    • 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: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by everphilski ( 877346 )
        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 u
        • 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: (Score:2)

            by stokessd ( 89903 )
            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
            • 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.

          • 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.

      • "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 [google.com]

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by lazy-ninja ( 1061312 )
      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.
    • 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).

      • 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 pi

      • Re:Ads up (Score:4, Informative)

        by camperslo ( 704715 ) on Wednesday March 26, 2008 @11:18AM (#22870404)
        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: (Score:2)

        by adisakp ( 705706 )
        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

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by adisakp ( 705706 )
      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,
    • 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 o

  • Just bought one (Score:4, Informative)

    by robably ( 1044462 ) on Wednesday March 26, 2008 @08:13AM (#22868320) Journal
    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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by SIGBUS ( 8236 )
      ...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: (Score:2)

        by jimicus ( 737525 )
        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 a

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Firehed ( 942385 )
          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

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Hatta ( 162192 )
      So start rsync before you go to bed and let it do its job. You've only got to fill it once.

    • 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.

  • just keep on dumping it in China (Score:4, Interesting)

    by tero ( 39203 ) on Wednesday March 26, 2008 @08:21AM (#22868400)
    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: (Score:2)

      by mh1997 ( 1065630 )

      [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 su

    • 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.

    • 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?

  • saving 10 watts! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by John Sokol ( 109591 ) on Wednesday March 26, 2008 @08:29AM (#22868466) Homepage Journal
    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.

    • According to the Energy Infomration Administration [doe.gov], there are 107 million households in the US. The end-use consumption of electricity by household [doe.gov] 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. Y

      • 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 dro

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Bert64 ( 520050 )
      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
      • Sure if I wanted to spend 3K instead of 1K on my server. New drives are $100 each. It's just darn inconvenient.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tji ( 74570 )
      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, thes

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mrand ( 147739 )
      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/ [msn.com]
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisker_(metallurgy) [wikipedia.org]
      and of course, just to save someone a bit of typing or extra mouse click:
      http://www.google.com/search?q=tin+whiskers [google.com]

      Marc

    • heat isn't so bad (Score:3, Insightful)

      by adpowers ( 153922 )

      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 [google.com] [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.

  • Wrong Standard? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Sponge Bath ( 413667 ) on Wednesday March 26, 2008 @08:36AM (#22868546)

    ...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)

  • 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: (Score:2)

      by mcvos ( 645701 )
      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

  • ...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...

    • Summery
      looks like two preview buttons are broken
      • 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. (Score:3, Informative)

    by amcdiarmid ( 856796 ) <amcdiarmNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Wednesday March 26, 2008 @09:14AM (#22868880) Journal
    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

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by MrNemesis ( 587188 )
      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 dri
      • 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.
        • 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 serv
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • It's closer to 10.24W per drive, but you know the hard drive industry and their "marketing watt" definition...
  • Use one of the new Hitachi 7200 rpm TravelStar notebook drives. Desktop-like performance, and only TWO watts average consumption.

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