Samsung EcoGreen 500GB SATA Hard Drive

$15 off $100 using eBillme coupon code ZZF121609 [Exp 12/16]

Newegg Western Digital Caviar Black 750GB 32MB Cache HDD $60 Discuss (0)

Tiger Direct Western Digital Caviar Green 1.5TB SATA Hard Drive $92 Discuss (4)

Frys Hitachi Deskstar 7K2000 2TB SATA 7200RPM Hard Drive $112 Discuss (0)

Target Western Digital Elements 1TB Hard Drive $60 Discuss (2)

Latency is a full ms slower than on comparable WD or Seagate drives... stay away from this one.

#1 you are mistaken. both seagates and wd drive latency is just about equal to this when comparing LOW POWER drives. seagate's barracuda LP has almost the exact same specs as this but this one uses even less power. For an ultra low power machine, this would be a good deal.
i have a dual-core atom server with a raid array consisting of 3 power hungry drives. on full load, the server uses about 90watts. with the array turned off, the server dips down to under 50. If i had these drives instead, total wattage wouldn't go above 65 for a great home server.

So every manufacturer is coming out and claim how green their drives are now. The only thing they haven't done is to make the drives green in color.

This whole green drive concept is B$. I've tried a few and I'm very disappointed- this whole concept is a major marketing technique, just another excuse for manufacturers to use cheaper ka slower components, call it "green" and slap a fat price tag on a hard drive that is slower than my old seagate 7200.10

A lot of people don't realize that by using a faster hard drive you reduce read/write times a lot and by doing that you effectively save a lot of power compared to a slower drive with a few watts lesser power draw.

Nice, #4. I can't say for certain if you're right about this drive, but your reasoning is cynical and likely accurate.

Quote:

A lot of people don't realize that by using a faster hard drive you reduce read/write times a lot and by doing that you effectively save a lot of power compared to a slower drive with a few watts lesser power draw.

This is flat-out made up and wrong.

What good is "performance" in an application that doesn't need it and will never use it? Using faster, hotter, more power-hungry drives for media storage applications like these drives are aimed at is a stupid waste of money by people that don't understand storage technology.

Irregardless, 500gb for 46 bucks shipped is a good deal. I'm in for one as I don't need the full TB yet.

Oh boy, a WHOLE 1 millisecond slower. There goes all hopes of global domination and prosperity. Oh wait, you just used more time typing that than you'd ever notice in real uses.

#6 wrote:

What good is "performance" in an application that doesn't need it and will never use it? Using faster, hotter, more power-hungry drives for media storage applications like these drives are aimed at is a stupid waste of money by people that don't understand storage technology.

To some extent that's true, but lots of media storage applications benefit from performance, like in a concurrently accessed fileserver, database server, or doing video editing, encoding, etc.

It's also a bit arbitrary to assume that both these drives are aimed at media storage and that the buyer intends to use them for the purpose you suppose they are intended for.

Further, the heat and power usage difference between one hard drive and the next is pretty small in the context of total system power usage and heat vs cooling requirement. There are plenty of other drives which don't cost much if any more to buy and the pennies saved in use are just that, pennies.

Besides all that, it doesn't make these bad for media storage either, it's just that people are trying hard to find differences where there aren't many, it's mostly marketing department drivel when it comes to having much of an effect on typical uses.

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