Lowest power consumption in a big 2.5" hard drive?

[moorerp]

Hi All,

I am in search of the 320GB (or more) 2.5" hard drive with the absolute lowest power consumption possible for an application that will basically require the drive to record digital video constantly for 3+ days.

My problem is this: although I've found a lot of info on Tom's site concerning power consumption in 2.5" hard drives, I don't know which category of power consumption describes the process of writing video data to the disc! Tom's measurements are usually categorized as 'maximum throughput,' 'idle,' 'HD video playback,' and 'workstation I/O.'

So, my questions are two: 1) Do any of you know which of these categories will come closest to describing the power requirements when writing video data to a hard drive? And 2) Do any of you have suggestions for the lowest power consumption 320+GB hard drive that will work for such an application?

Thanks!
Randall

p.s.- I do get that SSD's would be a better choice for my application, but they're prohibitively expensive for this project.

 

[photonboy]

All the data you want can be found at the hard drive manufacturers' web sites.

1) Seek Mode consumes the most power (see my link at the bottom). Idle power and below would be very accurate. Seek power would vary slightly from the listed value depending how intensely the hard drive is reading or writing so the example I gave should vary between 0.85 and 2.5 Watts. I estimate that this hard drive would consume about 1.5 Watts on average when recording a TV show.

2) Read the specs at manufacturers sites. They list the power consumption for every drive.

I'm not quite sure why you are so concerned with getting the absolute lowest power in a 2.5" drive. A really efficient computer would use about 40 Watts. Most use closer to 100 Watts. This drive uses 2.5 Watts maximum and 0.85 Watts when idling.

My recommendation is one of the 2.5" "Western Digital Scorpio Blue" drives between 320GB and 640GB. The consume a maximum of 2.5W

Here's the link:
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=506

 

[apache_lives]

desktop drives dont consume that much power, you are aware, right?

 

[sminlal]

desktop drives dont consume that much power, you are aware, right?

Compared to laptop drives they do. For example, a 500GB WD Green drive (a "low power" desktop drive) consumes 6W during read/write, over twice as much as the 500GB 2.5" Scorpion Blue that photonboy referred to. The advantage of the desktops is that you can go up to 2000GB with that same 6W power consumption - but it's still a higher power draw.

 

[moorerp]

"1) Seek Mode consumes the most power (see my link at the bottom). "

I appreciate the response, but my issue is still unresolved- "seek mode" isn't listed in the current requirements on that WD Scorpio page (read/write, idle, standby, sleep) or on Tom's testing pages (he uses the categories I listed in the original thread). I just need to know which of these categories comes closest to describing what happens when recording video to the drive. I suspect it's read/write, but I don't know 'cause I'm woefully ignorant of this stuff.



"I'm not quite sure why you are so concerned with getting the absolute lowest power in a 2.5" drive. A really efficient computer would use about 40 Watts. Most use closer to 100 Watts. This drive uses 2.5 Watts maximum and 0.85 Watts when idling."

Because I need the lowest power consumption possible while retaining the ability to record high resolution digital video- it's going to be a field-deployed system run off a 12V deep cycle battery and needs to last as long as possible.