X-bit labs

Hitachi Unveils Energy-Efficient Hard Drive with Variable Spindle Speed.

Category: Storage

by Anton Shilov

[ 10/22/2007 | 12:35 PM ]

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) on Monday announced its family of hard disk drives (HDDs) that boast with considerably reduced power consumption thanks to variable spindle speed.

“The development of ‘green’ computing products that comply with energy-rating programs, such as Energy Star 4.0, is becoming an extremely important initiative for our customers. With the Deskstar P7K500 hard drive, we have merged our various power management innovations into one drive, achieving leading power specifications that make a positive contribution to system power consumption,” said Shinjiro Iwata, executive vice president, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies.

Hitachi Deskstar P7K500 hard disk drives are currently available in 250GB, 320GB, 400GB and 500GB capacities, feature 7200rpm motor, sport 8MB/16MB dynamic random access memory (DRAM) cache and come in 3.5” form-factor. Hitachi declares media transfer rate of 1138Mb/s and 4.17ms average latency.

Hitachi GST has implemented a set of power-saving technologies to reduce the P7K500’s active and idle power consumption by up to 40% over the previous generation. As a result, the P7K500 achieves best-of-breed power consumption on its one-disk model and significant power savings on its two-disk model. Through a 40% power reduction, Hitachi GST has delivered unmatched idle power utilization of 3.6W on the 250GB capacity model and 4.8W on models with capacities of 320GB or greater. Similarly, the P7K500 has reduced its active power requirements to 6.4W and 8.2W for its one- and two-disk models, respectively.

Hitachi GST achieved the Deskstar P7K500’s 40% power reduction through three substantial design changes. Using the company’s HiVERT technology, which was first pioneered with the Hitachi Travelstar mobile products, the Deskstar P7K500 hard drive increases the use of switching regulators in place of linear regulators for more efficient voltage conversion in the electronics. The drive has also adopted the Travelstar system-on-chip design with a more power-efficient profile, which further reduces power consumption.

The Deskstar P7K500 will be available in high volume later in Q4 2007.