by Angela MillerI read with interest Western Digital’s announcement of their new GreenPower Drives. Their marketing statement is that this line of drives can save a significant amount of energy over all their competitors’ drives. Western Digital intends to deploy the GreenPower technology primarily on their desktop and notebook drives – most notably on the 3.5″ Caviar SATA drives and the 2.5″ Scorpio mobile drives. They will launch their enterprise GP drives in the later part of 2007.  Their specifications and cited industry research assert that they can save 4-5 watts over competitor drives in idle mode. I tried to substantiate this number with some simple research of specifications offered by the different main competitors in the space using the 3.5″ Caviar SATA 500GB drive as the primary comparison. Because Western Digital has not yet announced specifications for the enterprise, I chose three primary competitors based on Gartner estimates of the share of the desktop market: Seagate, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, and Samsung.

Looking at these numbers is a little like looking at the MPG estimate stickers on cars so it also seemed prudent to see whether any respected technical testing entities had put these drives through their paces. While a review of Tom’s Hardware, AnandTech, ComputerWorld, Storage IO, and The Tech Report, showed that none of these entities had yet tested the Western Digital GP specification, most other specifications came close to the advertised numbers.From an enterprise IT perspective, choosing a drive that natively uses significantly less power than comparable drives will result in energy savings. If a company converts to drives that will use ½ of the power of other drives, the company might save as much as $10/year/drive in energy cost.But as a former IT manager, I would have a few concerns:- In my experience, IT Managers at the enterprise level make decisions about desktop equipment based on the computer vendor rather than components. Rarely would the IT manager specify a particular hard drive, or make a decision on the vendor based solely on the hard drive they offer.- At the enterprise level, IT Managers depend on vendors to provide an overall solution: you could not approach HDS and request Western Digital as a drive vendor when their OEM providers are HGST and Seagate.- None of the drives will attain peak energy efficiency performance numbers without serious consideration to configuration, software setup, and consolidation. The bottom line- one 1TB drive will use less energy than 4 250GB drives.The important take-away from the Western Digital announcement from my perspective: Western Digital is setting the bar higher for energy efficiency and will force their competitors to rise to that expectation in order to retain market share. This energy efficiency innovation will stimulate the hard drive market toward more future improvements.

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I relied on the following sites for analysis in support of this post:GartnerWestern DigitalSamsungHitachi Global Storage TechnologiesSeagateTom’s HardwareAnandTechStorageIOThe Tech Report