Question: Eco-friendly hard drives

Hi all,

I had been researching hard drives and recently was made aware of the eco-friendly drives on Western Digital's site. They seem like what I'm looking for as far as energy consumption is concerned. They use far less energy than drives of comparable capacity among the different brands. My question is this: is there a noticeable compromise in speed between the eco-friendly (GP) drives and the regular 7200rpm drives? Energy consumption is important to me, but not nearly as important to me as speed is, at the moment. I have 'googled' it and read extensively on WD's website, and nothing has offered me a clear answer. None of the sites I've visited even list an 'rpm' for the Does anyone out there use these types of drives, or can anyone at all offer any insight?

 

Here's a review including a "green" WD 1TB drive (I think this is what you're talking about): http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3161

You can see that's it's a bit slower than the standard Seagate unit with respect to both raw transfer speeds and seek times. For now I'd say you're better off getting a standard drive if you're just looking for disk speed.

But this is all pointless if you're looking for a laptop drive, because they don't make this type of "green" drive for the notebook yet.

 

Thanks, Commander Wolf. I was reading on the link you posted that the GP speed is variable (5400rpm-7200rpm). I guess it decides how fast it will spin depending on the task it's performing. I'm still trying to figure out if that's really worth it or not.

 

What does an eco friendly harddrive do? Grow grass?

 

Go SSD if you want to go "green". Less power usage, no heat, no noise.

 

The speed isn't variable. It's 5400RPM fixed. WD is being misleading about that. Still, neat idea.

 

Basically, their is potentiometer on the motor, which forces the harddrive speed to increase when a stress is being placed onto the harddrive. The harddrive speeds up from 5400 to 7200rpm's and thus read and writes faster. However, when the drive is not being taxxed, it clocks down to 5400rpm, thus saving power and running cooler.
However, do not expect miracles. The drive uses about 2 watts less power, so it does not really impact the environment or your electric bill at all.
If you want a greener pc, enable speedstep/cool and quiet, and undervolt your processor. This way your system will use much less power, and slightly deccrease your electric bill.

K-TRON