Bladewatch.com

http://www.pcworld.in/news/index.jsp/artId=6684827

Western Digital has announced new hard drives that use up to 40 percent less power than competing drives.

The serial ATA drives are part of a new GreenPower-branded line (RE2-GP), with 500GB, 750GB and 1TB capacities. They use on average 4 to 5 watts less than similar-size drives from Hitachi GST, Fujitsu, Seagate and other major suppliers.

Western Digital said four branded technologies boost the power efficiency of the new drives:

* IntelliPower balances spin speed, transfer rate and caching algorithms to avoid always spinning at top speed. And less current is used during start-up, which allows more drives to spin up simultaneously, resulting in faster system readiness.
* IntelliSeek optimizes seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise and vibration.
* IntelliPark automatically unloads the recording heads during idle mode to reduce aerodynamic drag and disables read/write channel electronics.
* Active Power Management monitors a drive’s workload and automatically puts the drive in idle mode whenever possible to reduce unnecessary power consumption. Drive recovery time from idle mode is less than one second.

Very cool, making the hard drive more energy efficient has to be a good thing for the consumer and the industry. when I mentioned this to Chris the other day he said “No solid state is the way to go”, and it is, but we can’t necessarily switch overnight to solid state disks or the SAN equivalent. Being given the choice of an energy efficient drive at least allows us to save power in a way that might not need significant changes in the system configuration etc.

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