Joining competing energy efficient designs, Hitachi’s latest 7200 RPM 500 GB drive claims to draw under 5 watts at idle.
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Hitachi Cuts Power Use for World’s Most Energy-Efficient Desktop hard Drive
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“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,” said Shinjiro Iwata, executive vice president, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. “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.”
Built using Hitachi GST’s sixth-generation power management technology, as well as other new energy innovations, the Deskstar P7K500 represents a significant decrease in power consumption over its predecessor as well as competitive hard drives in its class.
In addition, the P7K500 incorporates Hitachi GST’s second-generation perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) heads and disks, enabling 250GB-per-platter areal density and ensuring a high level of reliability. With the delivery of this next-generation desktop hard drive, Hitachi GST provides a complete desktop HDD product portfolio built on the industry’s most reliable PMR technology.
Eco-Friendly Technologies
“Energy expenses related to IT hardware in the data center and in the office are becoming a significant cost for organizations,” according to John Rydning, IDC’s Research Manager for hard disk drives. “IT hardware component suppliers will need to do their part to help improve the overall power consumption of PCs, servers and storage systems, and Hitachi GST’s next-generation HDDs with reduced power consumption is a step in the right direction.”
Hitachi GST achieved the Deskstar P7K500’s 40-percent 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.
Finally, all of the Deskstar hard drives incorporate Hitachi GST’s Advanced Power Management capabilities, which have been implemented for six product generations. These capabilities significantly lower the power consumption of hard drives while in idle mode, which is most of the time. The Deskstar P7K500 also takes advantage of Hitachi GST’s patented load/unload technology to allow for additional power reductions:
* Unload idle – The heads are safely unloaded to the ramp and the servo is shut off; this mode delivers power savings of 11 percent better than idle mode.**
* Low RPM idle – The heads are safely unloaded to the ramp, the servo is shut off and the spindle motor RPM is reduced; this setting achieves power savings of 44 percent better than idle mode.**
Additional information about the power management technologies employed in the Deskstar P7K500 can be found at Hitachi GST’s website at http://www.hitachigst.com/deskstar under white papers – “Technology Innovation for Eco-Friendly HDDs.”
Availability
The Deskstar P7K500 will be available in high volume later in 4Q 2007.
Technical Specifications:
Deskstar P7K500
250/320/400/500GB
185 billion bits per square inch maximum areal density
2/1 platters, 4/2 recording heads
1138 Mb/s max. media data rate
7200 RPM, 4.17 ms average latency
PATA-133 and 3Gb/s SATA
8 MB (single disk)/8MB and 16MB (two disk) data buffer
26.1 mm in height (max)
550 in weight (max)
350 G/2 ms non-operating shock
3.6/4.8 watt idle power
2.6/2.8 Bels typical idle acoustics
0 to 60 degrees C ambient temperature (operating)
