Sometimes, to make something better, and more progressive, it is necessary to go back, and check something from the past, and evaluate if choices made then can be mitigated today to produce something better.
Such is the case with ‘green hard drives’. Western Digital is producing drives that are given the moniker ‘green’ because they use less energy, being rotated at 5400 RPM, rather than the de facto standard of today, 7200 RPM.
It was not that many years ago that 5400 RPM was the very fastest rotation available on a non-SCSI drive – and we all know how expensive those were!
There was, during the time when 3.5” hard drives were coming into their own as the standard that a company, now another of many drive companies swallowed up by a larger one, called Quantum decided that the 5.25” drive [HD, that is] needed one last shot. It came out with a single platter, physically thin, 5.25” drive, that, by virtue of its data area, made large sizes economical. The drawback – although it was touted as a strength, was the drive’s rotational speed. It was only 4200 RPM. So large storage was available, with the added reliability of single platter and lower speed design, at a correspondingly inexpensive price point. It was called Big Foot.
Flash forward to today. How cool would it be to have a 3 TB hard drive? One drive, with 3TB capacity. How many weeks would it take even the most rabid music fan to fill that with stuff from iTunes or Napster?
By using the 5.25” form factor, and the areal density of the very latest drive designs, probably 3 TB would be small (this was a fleeting thought, I haven’t done the exact math). The green comes into the picture when you spin the platters at 5400 RPM instead of 7200, or even 10,000 RPM. Energy is saved, less heat is generated, and storage is maxed out.
This would not have to have the very fastest seek times, but wouldn’t need to be, as it is a ‘green’ design, but the sustained data rate (useful for things like streaming data, movies, etc) would be killer! Think of one of these designs in a DVR. I know I am.
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Technorati Tags: Western Digital – green hard drives – areal density – rotational speed – Quantum – Big Foot – SCSI – DVR – data streaming
[tags] Western Digital, green hard drives, areal density, rotational speed, Quantum, Big Foot, SCSI, DVR, data streaming [/tags]