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Price and Power

Seagate: Can There Be Only One?
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This consolidation offers a few key benefits to the market. Perhaps foremost, consolidation simplifies the buying process. Not only do buyers have fewer SKUs to consider, but there are fewer features to weigh between drive options. In the 3.5” desktop segment, buyers might consider drive throughput, cache size, and warranty. Of these, warranty will prove the most confusing, as the duration may depend on the model, serial number, place of manufacture, and whether the drive was sold in bulk pack (OEM) or retail. Spin rates on mainstream and performance desktop drives are now almost exclusively 7200 RPM, and cache size tends to have fairly minimal impact on total performance compared to, say, system memory size.

In other words, desktop hard drives have become rather homogenous. Certainly, there are variations in performance, and we’ll return to that shortly. But with far less competition and variety in the market, the few vendors left standing can spend less time trying to “out-feature” each other and more time working on perfecting the quality of their products. In fact, Seagate’s move to a single-model desktop line illustrates the logical end-game in this process.

Price and Power

In preparing for this article, we purchased four hard drives: the WD 1 TB Caviar Black (WD1002FAEX, $103.97, 64 MB cache), WD 1 TB Blue (WD10EZEX, $82.24, 32 MB cache), WD 1 TB Green (WD10EZRX, $78.77, 64 MB cache), and Seagate Barracuda 1 TB (ST1000DM003, $80.82, 64 MB cache). All drives feature 6 Gb/s SATA III interfaces, which is about three times more bandwidth than necessary for the drives’ maximum internal media transfer rate. Seagate’s drive places second from the bottom, only underbid by WD’s Green to the tune of four bucks and change. At the other extreme, the WD Black carries a greater than $23 premium. (This gap grows when moving up to the 2 TB level, with the Barracuda-to-Black delta becoming about $63.) Seagate’s claim of only needing one price in the desktop category seems justified given that the price in question is near the bottom of available options. (Note that all pricing in this article was pulled from Amazon in mid-October 2012.)

As we consider power, keep in mind that this is something of a non-issue for consumers. The few cents that might be saved in the course of a year by having one drive feature a 2W savings compared to another won’t buy a cup of coffee.

Both the WD Black and Blue drives consume 6.80W during active read/write operations, 6.10W at idle, and 1.20W in sleep/standby. The WD Green drops to 3.70W active, 2.30W idle, and 0.50W in sleep/standby because it uses a lower RPM rate, thus burning less energy by not having to rotate the heavy platters as fast. WD has been a bit secretive in saying the drive’s exact spin rate. Early “eco-friendly” drives focused on 5400 RPM, and it seems likely that the Green hasn’t ventured north of 6,000 RPM. To compound the confusion, WD has two 1 TB Green models. The second, the WD10EARX, consumes noticeably more power (5.3W, 3.3W, and 0.7W, respectively), specifies 40 MB/s lower sustained throughput, uses a 3 Gb/s SATA II interface, and costs $6 more. We’ll ignore this variant henceforward.

With these WD power numbers in mind, it’s interesting to observe that the Seagate specifies a 5.90W typical active draw, 3.36W idle, and 0.63W standby/sleep. Again, this places Seagate second to lowest in terms of power draw, which is a good thing. In fact, Seagate’s idle and standby/sleep modes, where consumer drives spend most of their time, are about half as energy-hungry as the Black and Blue.

This is likely a result of now using 1 TB platters across the Seagate Barracuda, which is why there are no 1.5 TB models. With less platter weight to spin, there’s less energy needed. Of course, the WD Blue is also a one-platter design, so there may be other factors involved, such as internal power component efficiency.