It’s a bit annoying that there don’t seem to be many low power SATA enterprise drives.
The Western Digital 500GB Green Power RE2-GP ones were good for a while, but then they went end-of-life. The only enterprise Green Power now are the 2TB RE4-GP at ~£160+VAT a go. What do you do at the 750GB – 1TB scale?
Then again, according to figures from span.com, the power usage of say the 1TB Hitachi-HGST Ultrastar A7K2000 24×7 HUA722010CLA330 0A39289 isn’t that far off that of the 2TB WD RE4-GP:
| Drive | Capacity | Wattage | Wattage (Idle) | Wattage (Sleep) | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Western Digital Caviar RE4-GP WD2002FYPS | 2TB | 6.8 | 3.7 | 0.8 | £161 |
| Hitachi-HGST Ultrastar A7K2000 24×7 HUA722010CLA330 0A39289 | 1TB | 8.4 | 3.9 | 0.8 | £86 |
So maybe drives that aren’t specifically marketed as “low power” are getting better in that regard?