# Reducing hard-disk power consumption? [answered; updated]

## Akkara

I have several Seagate baracudas, 7200.10's, which I had bought mostly on their 5-year warrenty after a couple other-branded drives had failed on me. (They have been rock-solid reliable so far, with ~2 years of 24/7 on the oldest.)

There's enough of them now that a raid configuration is very tempting.

But I'm concerned about power consumption.

Each drive draws 9-10 watts idle, and 13ish when busy.  Even operating outside the case in room-temperature free-air, they reach 50C.  And seeing they are rated to 55, that seems rathar close.  (In the case there is a fan blowing on them.)

Currently the machine draws 100 or so watts with one drive running and two spun down - that's without any low-power optimizations.  Increasing that by 30 or 40 doesn't sound good, especially since I'll probably need to re-do the cooling and I really rathar not have to listen to a small tornado blowing in there.

So my question is two-fold:

Are there models of hard-disks that use less power and that are also reliable?

Those of you running raid configurations, is there something you've done, or that could be done, to bring its power draw down?  Does it make sense to spin-down a raid when not in use?  What is the impact of start-stops on drive lifetime?

Thanks!Last edited by Akkara on Tue Nov 20, 2007 11:00 am; edited 1 time in total

----------

## jvale

This might be of some help concerning software tweaking, although not RAID-specific: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/power-management-guide.xml#doc_chap5

----------

## schachti

 *Akkara wrote:*   

> 
> 
> Are there models of hard-disks that use less power and that are also reliable?
> 
> 

 

Samsung was well known to build quiet drives that consume less power than most other HDDs - but I don't know if this is still valid for their current products.

Many PC magazines that do hardware tests also publish the power consumption of the tested drives - so you could look for these tests. As I mostly read German magazines, I cannot give you a link...

----------

## snIP3r

hi akkara!

my former server had sw-raid0 (2drives with samsung 120gb drives) and sw-raid1(2drives with good old ibm 10gb drives, each 10years old) with some hdparm parameters to spin down the drives. this worked perfect. the machine ran 24/7 for many years with no drive failure - but this may be luck  :Wink:  the only thing was that it took some time to spin the drives up when needed.

in my new server i use some WD 3200YS RaidEdition drives. the drives each consumpt 9-10 watts in read/write and 1,6 watts in standby. the server needs ~80watts idle with these hw parts:

amd x2 3800+ ee

2gig ddr800 ram

4x wd 3200ys re drives on a 3ware 9650se controller in raid5 configuration

but here i cannot make the drives spin down because of the hw-raid5 config. i think you can save most power with throttling the cpu down in idle (if your cpu supports the feature).

HTH

snIP3r

----------

## eccerr0r

All in all I don't think hard drive power consumption nowadays vary much, as if hard drive speed dictates power consumption.  I pretty much have to fan cool all of my 24/7 hdd's in hopes it would increase service life.  Every single last drive of seagate from 7200.7 newer that I have get quite warm.  The newer "Maxtgates" are just Seagates.  My WD SATA's get hot.  I'll check my Samsung SATA and HGST disks sometime but IIRC without the fan, they get quite hot too...

Almost seems the only solution is to just get a farm of laptop hard drives...

----------

## Cyker

Using hdparm to set sleep and spindown times can help, but on a RAID array this can actually end up using more power if the whole array spins down and then spins up again!

Setting the AAM and power management modes can also help, but annoyingly the Seagate 7200.10s don't have much support for that sort of thing (They don't support AAM acoustic management at all, and they seem to use non-standard commands for power management (?!)).

As for hardware, Seagate and Hitachi drives (At least current ones) are the worst for noise and power usage.

Samsung and Western Digital OTOH are pretty good - Their drives are generally much quieter and use about half the power of Seag/Hit drives when active and 10-15% less at idle, 'tho this varies and in some cases they use a few % MORE power than Seag/Hit drives at idle.

My current fav. drive manufacturer is WD; Their drives are quiet, perform well and do not consume a lot of power.

Previously, it was Maxtor - My Maxtor MaxLine III's are still the best drives I've had as they were cheap (relatively, for an enterprise-grade drive) and performed well with low noise and low power draw, but Seagate's killed them off in favour of their shitty ES drives (Which are basically 7200.10's that cost 50% more  :Evil or Very Mad: )

I picked up the 7200.10s for my array because they were the cheapest 500GB drives I could find at the time aside from the 7200.9's (And I got all starry-eyed about the perpendicular recording guff after some git posted that damned flash animation on Slashdot!  :Shocked:  ), but they have been pretty dissapointing.

First of all, they are noisy as hell when they seek, and as you've found they get ludicrously hot. I actually had to put active cooling (Well, a fan  :Razz: ) into the bay because they were hitting 50C+ just from normal use, where the MaxLines they were replacing (Which were also 4-platter drives!) wouldn't even break 40C unless I was hammering them!

I've already had one of them suddenly die on me (Thank **** this was a RAID5 array. SMART was, as usual, no help...), and that was less than a month after purchase!

I had to replace it with a WD5000AAKS because the RMA took so long (Just over a month it took them! And that seems to be par for them; When I RMA'd my 160GB 2.5" hard disk it took them a month and a half to get one back to me! Maxtor's RMA service was alright, but nothing to write home about. Compared to Seagate's it was the epitome of efficiency!)

I'd like to swap out all the drives (Currently 2WD's and 2Seagates) for some of those 1TB WD's with the smart head-seeky thing. They hit a max power draw of just under 7W according to the marketing blurb, which is pretty darn good!

They're also gonna be pretty darn expensive I suspect...

----------

## Akkara

Thanks for the answers everyone!

Looks like I can't do much with what's there now.  But good stuff to think about as future upgrades roll around.

----------

## widan

 *eccerr0r wrote:*   

> All in all I don't think hard drive power consumption nowadays vary much, as if hard drive speed dictates power consumption.

 

It does. Most of the power is used to keep the disk spinning at the required speed, at least when idle.

 *eccerr0r wrote:*   

> Almost seems the only solution is to just get a farm of laptop hard drives...

 

Some people already had that idea... look at that thing.

----------

## Cyker

I'm a bit wary; In my experience, 2.5" HDs don't like being run 24/7 for long periods...

I guess if you are a corporate entity using hotswap and some custom RAID (5 and 6 won't cut it with that many drives!  :Wink: ) the failure rate won't matter so much vs. the power savings!  :Wink: 

Then again if this becomes popular, maybe we'll see enterprise-grade 2.5" drives  :Very Happy: 

----------

## widan

 *Cyker wrote:*   

> Then again if this becomes popular, maybe we'll see enterprise-grade 2.5" drives 

 

Those already exist. They use an SAS interface (SCSI protocol over an SATA-like electrical interface), and run at 10k rpm, just like the regular 3.5" SCSI drives.

----------

## Cyker

Bloody hell! I didn't realise that.

Fujitsu are really pushing the 2.5" drive market apparently!  :Wink: 

I just hope it's of a more reliable standard than their usual stuff  :Mr. Green: 

----------

## Akkara

Quick update for anyone interested: Recently the Western Digital 1TB drives were on sale, and decided to try one.

Seems to work great.

Huge improvements in reducing power consumption.  Idle (spun up but not reading/writing) power is around 4 watts - less than 1/2 of the Seagate 750GB.  Active power is 5-6 watts.  Runs significantly cooler than the seagate - hddtemp is reporting 39C vs 49C currently.

Speed-wise seems similar to the barracuda when reading large files.  Smaller reads, and seeks, doesn't perform as well.  I didn't try to quantify it accurately.  It "feels" around 75% of the barracuda doing things like find that make a lot of small reads.  Still seems plenty fast accessing application data.  But the system partition is still on the barracuda so the drive isn't seeking as much as it would if the system partition were on the WD.

----------

