News Western Digital introduces new GreenPower HDDs

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2007/07/24/western_digital_intros_greenpower_hdds/1

Western Digital's new GreenPower family of hard drives will use up to 40 percent less energy.

 

Marketing BS.

If you want to use less power, get solid state!

 

..Or turn of your PC when you don't need it...

 

But where does it get to the point where we're not allowed to fart without planting a tree?

 

Good luck getting big capacities then.. for the time being

 

sure we could go solid state. nothing like paying $8k for 512gigs of space

 

You know it will come down in price, look how cheap USB/stick memory is.

 

Of course, the PSU will have to actually translate that power saving over to the plug ...

 

True, speeds need to increase too though. Bit-tech's own review of that SSD drive the other day didn't impress me much.

 

Uh, well, unless i'm missing something, that's exactly what'll happen. Efficiency aside, it isn't like the PSU is constantly sucking 500W (or whatever) and burning off anything you aren't using in heat/noise etc.

More than happy to be corrected/proven wrong though

 

You are correct, but efficiency drops quite a lot when the PSU isn't under plenty of load.

 

I would have thought that the PSU would be more efficient under less load, as the unit runs cooler etc, so thus less heat given off and well more energy efficient

 

^^^ Correctemundo.

Moreover, people are forgetting another benefit (besides laptop applications) of a 40% drop in power requirements: a 40% drop in heat generated. Think about it.

Not quite as simple as that. We need more robust flash memory that can stand a lot more re-writes. We also need it to work faster. We need FRAM.

FRAM memory chips have memory cells that contain a specific ferroelectric material such as a crystal of zirconium or titanium, or oxygen and lead. FRAM is much faster than Flash, and has a near-unlimited number of write-erase cycles. Unfortunately chips produced are still at the Mbit, rather than Gbit stage...

 

i like more efficient hard drives, i am thinking of buying one.

 

Definitely useful for the datacenters while still moderately useful for home use. It would be great if entire neighbourhoods just used these drives for mass storage.

 

When I built my current rig I went with a WD hard drive for the main one and after a while discovered that some intermittent stability problems I was having likely came down to the hard drive overheating, I have since rearranged the components a bit to provide it with better airflow and switched the primary hdd over to a similar samsung spinpoint.

Now given my experience, where heat (and maybe a touch of noise) were the only complaints I had about the WD hdd, I'm not too surprised that they seem to have put some effort into getting the heat down

 

The unit running cooler has little to do with it, as efficiency is simply the ratio of input energy to useful output. It gives off less heat in absolute terms, but what you should be looking at is the heat output as a proportion of the input power.

Compared to linear regulators, the switch-mode power supplies in computers do not have a linear relationship between power and efficiency. It looks something like this (image stolen from Coding Horror):



You can see that at lower output levels the efficiency drops quite significantly, whereas the peak efficiency sits at around 50-60% of the rated output.

 

Efficiency of pretty much any PSU not in the 80+ club is near abysmal at lower outputs. The closer you get to its theoretical max, the less energy is being wasted in the constant discharging. That's the beauty of 80+ PSUs, though....they have to be at least 80% efficiency across their load spectrum.

 

yeah as said above, 50-60% is about the sweet spot (people usually say about 2/3 - it depends on the PSU)

 

Nerd.

I agree with Jamie, its BS. If we focused on developing renewable sources of energy quicker we wouldn't be making a carbon footprint. If we had 10 trillion wind turbines and had 1000 times more power than we could ever need, wouldn't we all be leaving our computers and lights on constantly?

Electricity is not bad, the way we make it is. People need to keep that in mind to avoid marketing gimmicks.