[Gllug] Wanted - small (20, 30, 40gb) ide disks for kids' computers

[Nix]

On 17 Nov 2009, general spake thusly:
> energy footprint and speed/capactity is not a big issue you might be
> better off getting 2.5" to 3.5" adapters and using old notebook drives
> where you can.

Does anyone know how the energy footprint of drives like this differs
from the energy footprint of things like the WD GreenPower drives?

I suspect that old notebook drives are better *only* if you spin them
all the way down most of the time, which is a sod because spinning them
back up again costs a lot of power and is really slow. The nice thing
about the GreenPowers and other low-power non-laptop drives is that even
when spun down you can still access them (as they're still spinning,
just not as fast), and if you need speed they spin back up again and
give it to you. You do pay a bit performance-wise: I lose about 7Mb/s,
leaving me with, oh, 80Mb/s at the fast edge, 48Mb/s at the slow: I'd
call that a tolerable loss, especially given that the drives they
replaced delivered an awesome 10Mb/s on a good day. Seek time is goodish
(again unlike laptop hard drives which often have appalling seek times
and data transfer rates both).

I haven't actually measured its power consumption, but tomshardware
reviewed these drives in 2008 and noted an idle power consumption of
3.6W, which isn't half bad (I have four of them in my server RAID
array, on constantly of course, so that translates to 15W continuous
draw from the drives alone).

<http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/energy-disk-drive,1944-4.html>
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