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

[general_email at technicalbloke.com]

Nix wrote:
> 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>
>   

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/power-saving-guide,1612-11.html

On average it says you can expect to save 10w using a 2.5" over a 3.5"
and I assume the OP will only be using older recycled drives. Most 2.5"
use half a watt while idling and draw up to 4w at peak load so they're
pretty power efficient. 3.5"ers idle somewhere between 3.5w and 9w.


Roger.
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