Do the WD Green Power Drives actually slow down?

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felixrosbergen

Senior Member
I am just curious if and when these guys actually slow down or stop if not in use.

I have a 500GB as primary Win2k3 server drive (so i don't expect that one to sleep) and a 1TB one for SageTV video storage. The 1TB drive i would expect to but off most of the day unless i'm recording or watching something.

Is there an application of some sort that woudl tell me when these drives are sleeping?

overall my Cure2Duo 3.16, 2GB RAM, Hauppage 500 machine on Antec NeoPower 430 uses consistently between 80 and 65watts according to KillaWatt, thats a lot better than my previous server which used nothign less than 180 watts.

The CPU throttling software (Gigabite mobo) seems to be able to reduce the power draw be another 3 watts or so. Hardly worth loosing performance over. I was hopig to get it down more, but no luck so far. This machine runs very cool and i am thinking about replacing the 120mm and 80mm case fans with mobo controlled or sensor activated ones. Especially the 120mm fans probably draws a good bit.

Is 80watts pretty normal for a performance machine built with energy efficency in mind?

This thing will be on 24/7 running SageTV and CQC so if i can cut another 10-20 watts somehow that would be very good over the years.

Right now 80 watts (at almost unity power factor) would me about 50 cents a day or US$15/month, $180/year to run. On an annual bases every watt I save woudl equate about $2.
 
My server is about 180W. But my guess that's because the hard drives in it don't go to sleep (the RAID card won't allow it).

There are 4 250GB drives in there. I'm considering taking out the CDROM / DVD burner drive, as I just don't use it.

--Dan
 
drozwood90 said:
My server is about 180W. But my guess that's because the hard drives in it don't go to sleep (the RAID card won't allow it).

There are 4 250GB drives in there. I'm considering taking out the CDROM / DVD burner drive, as I just don't use it.

--Dan
Click to expand...

My system runs at 80W + 20W for the UPS. I have 4 fans running full time on that so there are a few extra watts floating around. I also
have 500Gb SATA RAID.
 
I doubt a CD/DVD drive uses much when you're not using it.

The TV tuner only added about 6 to 8 watts.

Grayson....40 to 60 watts is very nice...did you do anything special?

Back to the original question....

How can i tell if the hard drives are asleep or running at low RPM or not?

Did i read somewhere that these drives should not be used for hardware RAID?

I know their lower RPM or sleep modes will be waster when conneted as a raid, but any other problems?

Right now i have 1 500GB for OS and 1 TB for Video storage. I'm thinking about getting another 500GB and running them as RAID1 for added safety. At 8watts or so this shouldnt break the power bank.
 
I believe the drives are spec'd to run between 5400-7200RPM. That is handled internally to the drive.
I have 3 of the 1TB WD10EACS drives in a ReadyNAS NV+. There is a issue with the drive firmware that causes ATA errors when the drives are spun down by control, meaning the controller sends a spin down command. WD knows about this and there are posts on their forums. Therefore, if you use the drives, don't enable spindown.

There's a newer model (don't remember the model number off hand) and I'm not sure if it has the same problem.
 
Well, if you can bring your CPU down to 1.0GHz at 0.9 volts (vcore), that will certainly help bring down the consumption to 40 watts or less. I remember when running my server, consuming about 35 watts, but then I don't know where my Kill-A-Watt is at as I can't find it. :)
 
Grayson Peddie said:
Well, if you can bring your CPU down to 1.0GHz at 0.9 volts (vcore), that will certainly help bring down the consumption to 40 watts or less. I remember when running my server, consuming about 35 watts, but then I don't know where my Kill-A-Watt is at as I can't find it. :blink:
Click to expand...


Funny enough my mobo has a 'tuning' application for overclocking...looks like my 3.16Ghz CPU runs at 2Ghz when no much is going on. I have never seen the CPU's max out yet (new machine), guess i need to get a prime number test or something..

I made some tweaks and got it down to 1.3ghz at times. My killawatt still reads a steady 83watts though...seems like all the power saving functions are not making much difference.

How much of the 83watts is the CPU typically consuming?

Components in this system are:
- Antec NeoPower 430
- Gigabite GA-EP45-UD3P Motherboards
- Intel 3.16 E8500 Core2Duo CPU (wolfdale)
- 1 stick of 2GB 1066 DDR2 ram
- 1 WD Greenpower 500GB drive
- 1 WD Greenpower 1TB drive
- DVD-RAM
- Breakout panels on front for USB, flash cards and audio (doesnt seem to use any power itself)
- 1 120mm case fan
- 1 80mm case fan
- Stock retail CPU cooling fan
- Hauppage MCE500 dual SD tuner card
- PCI-E 4 Port Serial Card

Could the mobo itself or other peripherals be consuming most of the power and the CPU at 2 GHZ is already 'low' so thats why i'm not seeing much differene going from 2ghz to something lower?

I'd love to get this thing down to 40w or will even settle for 60w or so. It doesnt need the processing power...for the moment it's only doing SageTV service duties (all HD extenders, so no transcoding done) and soon it will run CQC.

Maybe i should have purchased a slower CPU, but i can't imagine that a slow CPU would be more energy effient than a faster CPU thats is dialed back.
 
Perhaps your CPU has a TDP of 65 watts?

My Sempron and AMD Athlon X2 4050e has a TDP of 45 watts. Also, even if your power supply only draws power that it needs, a 430w power supply might consume more power than a 310w power supply. It depends on the effeciency of the power supply, but most power supply can perform about 80% effecient if the load is at least 20%. If you don't take effeciency in mind, let's say that the 430w PSU load is 20%. 430 * .20 = 86 watts used. However, I can be wrong (although my math is correct, effeciency and power factor must be taken into account).

Your hard drives work just fine, as it's designed to help conserve power, even when used.

Maybe some chipsets in the motherboard are using power even when idle?
 
one quick thing, your power supply is too big. the 80plus power supplies are only 80% efficient down to 20% load. lets say it's only 70% efficient so the actual usage is about 64 watts with 19 watts lost. if you get a smaller supply (300 W), you'll get the 80% efficiency and your loss is now only 12.8 watts so you save about 6 watts. not a lot and it's even less if it's more than 70% efficient at that load...

-edit- haha. i started my reply about 20 mins ago but got distracted and looks like GP beat me to the punch.
 
80% efficent down to 20% load. You guys think I'm running undr 20% load?

Guess i should have gotten a smaller PSU.

I tink the Intel C2D prociessors are 45 watts max, but i can be wrong. Whats is TDP?

At least this thing already consumes less than half of the machine it's replacing. That one ran 180 watts all the time. :eek:
 
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