So yesterday I was looking for a new hard drive as mine has started to reach about 75-80% full. Instead of burning the stuff to DVDs to make room, its much more economical to buy a new drive, besides the fact that I don't mind if I lose what I have as i can just reinstall or rip the music CDs again, albeit time consuming.

So, it has been a while since I've needed a new HDD, my 320GB cost me around $160 from memory. Well now for about the same you can get a 750GB hard drive. I thought I may as well get the top dog and go the one TERABYTE drive.

Upon searching, I found that manufacturers are offering a "Green" alternative. This intrigued me as I'm conscious about leaving my computer on when I'm not using it. In fact, I also turn off the router and modem when I leave for work.

I also like products that offer longer warranties, so I checked the Seagate drive and they claim in their datasheet that there is up to 43% power savings over previous desktop generations. So I looked at the datasheets and found that this references the 320GB drive (the one currently installed on my machine) and the new generation. So here's the energy savings on them from a power consumption perspective.

This mightn't seem like much but Western Digital estimate that you could save $10 per drive per year, based in USA [1]. If you have a data centre that adds up. If everyone in Australia did this the impact would be huge. Anyway I've included a table below of some greener hard drives available. Please note the Samsung HM252JJ is a laptop drive and this is just to show the differences between desktop and laptop drives.

Cheers,

Zane

References:

1. http://www.wdc.com/en/products/greenpower/index.asp
2. http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/datasheet/disc/ds_barracuda_7200_10.pdf
3. http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/datasheet/disc/ds_barracuda_7200_11.pdf