Hitachi brings out green Deskstar drives
updated 11:40 am EDT, Mon October 22, 2007
Hitachi Deskstar P7K500
Hitachi on Monday morning turned its attention to the environment and released the Deskstar P7K500, a new range of desktop hard drives focused on conserving power. The design is made for environmentally conscious hobbyists and computer designers and uses smarter power management to tangibly improve the active and idling power consumption. Active power use drops to as little as 6.4 watts for a single-platter drive and 8.2 watts for a two-platter model; when a drive is inactive, power use drops to as little as 3.6 watts, Hitachi says. The drop amounts to as much as a 59 percent reduction versus a typical desktop drive and can result in either more available power for other components in a system or else lower overall power use.
Drives vary in capacity between 250GB and 500GB and should be available in volume towards the end of the year at prices to be set later. Hitachi typically sells some of its drives as stand-alone devices to home users as well as to system builders, which can use the device in pre-assembled systems.
Save 5 Watts of power?
10/22, 12:12pm reply
Maybe I got this wrong, but you say the drive consumes 8.2 Watts of power which is 59% less than typical desktop drive, right? Who is interested in saving meager 5 Watts on a desktop where you can find 150 Watts graphics board 80 Watts CPU and other not so power conserving components? I'm all for power saving but I can't see any reason to position this drive as a 'special one'.
ViktorCode
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Joined: Jan 2006
Save the Earth
10/22, 02:04pm reply
I'm all in favor of efficient devices since altogether it saves me money if I also use devices wisely to begin with. But what a stretch to make this an environmentally morally good work too. Why not volunteer a few more hippies to live in caves to help use less energy.
I can consume power at 400 times the rate hippies are saving it just by keying-up my 2000-watt consuming radio talking about this particular issue or just by deciding to wash and dry my clothes today. Get the point? Did you know the sun emits more energy in 1 second than mankind has yet consumed over all time?
JackWebb
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Joined: Aug 2007