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Samsung’s new 1.5 TB hard drive claims 40% power savings

Mar 10, 2009 Green Technologies

Samsung HDD

Hard drives are being used everywhere — from our homes to data centers. While our home computer may still be consuming not so significant part of our overall power consumption, Google, Microsoft and others are grappling with ways to bring down data center power bills. So Samsung’s new EcoGreen F2 harddisk drive with 1.5 Tb capacity and claimed 40% power consumption saving may be just what they were looking for.

Usually, hard disk capacity increases means an increased number of disks, which translates to higher power consumption. But Samsung’s solution, dubbed EcoTriangle is a low-power, low-heat, low-noise operation technology, ensuring that the F2EG drive is 40% lower in power consumption in idle mode and 45% lower in reading/writing mode than competitive drives.The company is already shipping the F2EG for $149.00.

Now before you become sceptical about all the “eco” terminologies being flung around, Andy Higginbotham, director of Samsung’s HDD division explains: “Lower platter count means less power to start the motor, less power to continuously spin the motor and a lighter head-stack which takes less power to seek. With fewer heads and disks, the F2EG hard drive has a lower probability of head-disk failures, enabling customers to build more reliable systems.” The new EcoGreen F2EG hard disk gets its 1.5TB capacity with 500GB per disk.

Now what would the future green data center look like? Maybe it will have Google floating data center design, which will use the surrounding water for cooling purposes and get some of its power from the waves. It may use the Powernap and RAILS features being developed by University of Michigan researchers and it may offer customers value for their money by segregating data by types like Diomede!

Source: Physorg.

Tags: data centers, Google, Samsung