Hard Drives, Yesterday And Today: From 500 GB To 1.5 TB

Efficiency And Surface Temperature

This is what counts: the new drives may not be able to deliver more performance in all of the benchmarks, but they require considerably less power to get the job done. As a result, performance per watt has basically doubled within two generations, starting from the Spinpoint T166.

Since I/O performance isn’t quite a strength of 5,400 RPM hard drives, the efficiency numbers are not as brilliant as in the streaming test. Still, the power saving advantage of the EcoGreen drives is large enough to result in superior performance per watt even for workstation type I/O workloads.

Obviously, the reduced spindle speed directly translated into reduced drive surface temperature.