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:
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: data centers, Google, Samsung
LG outs solar phone competitor to Samsung
Feb 22, 2009 Green Technologies
LG Solar Phone
When Samsung unveiled its Blue Earth, LG could not but get into the game and sure enough, it had its own solar powered phone at the Barcelona Mobile World Congress. Maybe everything was put together in a hurry, so there is no name yet, let alone other details.
What we know though that the phone’s solar power system is embedded onto the battery cover. More specifically, exposing the panel to the sun for ten minutes will give the phone enough power for a three-minute call, making it the perfect companion for emergency situations when no power is available to charge a dead battery. If left in natural light for long periods, the solar panel creates enough standby power to power the phone without any charging devices.
LG plans to release this eco-friendly phone in the European market at the end of this year, wh makes less sense than ZTE’s decision to release its own solar powered phone in Jamaica, where people actually face problem of unreliable power supply. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: LG, Samsung, Solar power
After Samsung, ZTE to launch solar powered phone
Feb 14, 2009 Green Technologies, Philanthropy and Corporate Initiatives
ZTE Coral
ZTE, the Chinese manufacturer of phones and telecom equipment is going to launch the Coral-200-Solar, a solar powered phone that may bring mobile communication to communities not yet connected by reliable power supply.
ZTE is partnering Jamaica’s Digicel Group to roll out one of the world’s first mass-market solar cellphones to folks with “limited or no access to the power grid”. The phone gets its juice via an integrated solar charger that recharges the battery, so you don’t have to depend on power outlets at home . Coming in June, this handset may lack the flash of the Samsung Blue Earth, but low price would suit just fine to its target consumers.
Tags: Blue Ocean, Samsung, solar powered phone, ZTE
Samsung teases with a solar powered handset
Feb 13, 2009 Green Technologies
Samsung Blue Earth
Samsung has just let loose Blue Earth, a touchscreen phone that charges via solar cells on its back! There is not much info on the underlying hardware except that the handset is made from recycled PCM plastic.
Expected to be in UK market in Q2, 2009, Samsung says that the phone boasts an “eco” mode for efficiently adjusting screen brightness, backlight duration and Bluetooth usage, and an “eco walk” app / built-in pedometer to tell you how much CO2 emission you’ve saved by walking instead of driving!
While we have already seen a phone made from recycled plastic bottle from Motorola, the Blue Earth will really endear itself to environmentalists (as well as people in working in remote places, without steady electric supply?) if it lives up to its claim of the solar cells providing enough charge to make a phone call anytime the sun’s out.
While the color of the upcoming Barcelona Mobile World Congress may not be green (unlike the recent motor shows), every manufacturerr is making efforts. Nokia recently offered a version of N79 without a charger, so that one could reuse the old charger lying around.
Tags: cellphone, Samsung, Solar power
Brighter LEDs for your cars and TVs
Jan 15, 2009 Green Technologies
A new breakthrough by researchers with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s National Science Foundation-funded Smart Lighting Engineering Research Center and Samsung Electro-Mechanics promises 18 percent increase in light output and a 22 percent increase in wall-plug efficiency, which essentially measures the amount of electricity the LED converts into light.
The improved performance is due to reduction of “efficiency droop” — LEDs being most efficient when operating on low current densities, and seeing their efficiency greatly drop at higher current densities — the team replaced the traditional active layer of the LEDs with a new specially matched layer. The end result of droop is that LEDs are forced to operate at lower current densities, which feature much lower brightness and efficiency in achieving light output.
This droop is under the spotlight since today’s high-brightness LEDs are operated at current densities far beyond where efficiency peaks. Hopefully, with this development, we will see brighter and more efficient LEd backlights for our computer monitors and LCD TVs and those awesome LED car head and tail lamps as well.
Head over to Physorg for details.
Tags: LEDs, more efficiency, Samsung, US