Hardware Energy Efficient Hardware Investigated

Standby mode is not good for hard drives, so with way too agressive settings you will reach your maximum (WD usually have 300k load/unload count max) soon.

 

Relative to HD vs SSD power consumption, do not forget that to write/read the same amount of data, SSD usually takes less time thus will be more time at idle than HD.
Even if idle/load power contusion specifications are barely equal for both, if SSD is 2times faster then it will only half of the time at LOAD when comparing to HD thus being much more energy efficient...

 

nice first post

power wise SSDs would most likely be lower, if its Samsung based SSD they are norm the lowest but the cost of them is to high,an F2 or WD green hdd would do

 

If it gets the school to dump the lousy PoS P4 based towers quicker, then more power to me.

 

I really like this article but I don't like the hard drive chart. It's the only thing tested that you are likely to have more than one of so it should have been scaled differently. They should have measured the system with no drives installed (just the OS drive) and subtracted that out of the scale. If the scale showed that a green drive uses 4 watts at idle and a black drive uses 8w at idle it would have a greater impact. Their scale shows a 4% power savings, which is nothing. Now if they showed it the other way it would show a 50% power savings, which is substantial. With one hard drive it's six of one, half dozen of the other. But with a 6 drive media server it becomes a whole new thing. I know the article says the only time the would recommend green drives is for a 50w server or home theater but the chart doesn't get that point across.

I live in New York, where they actually have a delivery charge on top of my power charge. I am paying around 22 cents per kWh all together. Before I moved here I was paying 3.6 cents per kWh. If I can have 6 hard drives using the same amount of electricity as 3 I'm in.

 

Just a note about the ECO hard drives.
Would a lower spindle speed reduce wear & heat makeing the drives more reliable?

Eg 7200 to 5400 is 3/4 less. so if a a drive wears at a regular rate and turns 25% fewer times in a set times, would mechanicial failure rate be 25% less?

I'm not fussed about a watt or 2, it's not abig deal on my sli'd I7 wc setup.
but if i was told my data was 25% less likley to fail I'd be interested....
Also a lower speed would indicate less heat (as well as less heat as waste energy) and aso prolong life.

Having suffered a total drive failiure before a more secure drive would be of interest (even though I have 2 full coppies of all data)

 

I'd guess around the same.. but it's just a guess

bearings last forever pretty much.. not like the big wheel tires that came apart after you hit a few rocks

nice article