Low power Hard Drive options?

[mikeford]

I have a Micron Clientpro, a cheap older "thin" client low power type system with a Intel 810 MB and currently a Celeron 663, 256 MB ram, and 10 GB WD hard drive. Right now its a very light duty irc chat bot server for a game I play, but it runs 24/7, so I am thinking of tossing on all the handy to have running 24/7 stuff around the house, and looking to reduce the power consumption as long as its not too expensive or slow.

It does support a lot of low power modes, but I haven't explored that too much, lots of trouble in the past has me spooked, and I am not sure of all that XP pro supports. Suggestions on the processor in the cpu forum were for a P3 or Via C3, and I am wondering if anybody has some suggestions on Low power Hard Drives vs the WDC WD100BB (old 10 GB HD).

 

[Zepper]

You could always use notebook drives with an adapter (http://www.geeks.com sells one).
But even standard hard drives are not very power hungry - most will run on about 15 Watts after startup.

.bh.

 

[promposive]

Yea the lowest power option would probably be a "Low RPM" laptop hard drive, with one of those adapters..
You should be able to get an older smaller one for cheap, and adapters aren't bad either:
http://www.axshop.com/details.aspx/sku-1217/ = $2.74 shipped for adapter
(I havent bought from axshop, have heard mixed results, so use your own opinion)

 

[Peter]

Samsung have a special series for that, V120CE. These are the quietest and lowest power 3.5" IDE drives, 200 and 250 GBytes.

You can get somewhat lower with 2.5" notebook drives.

 

[mikeford]

eeeeek, isn't Samsung like the lowest quality drive brand?

 

[phisrow]

The lowest power drain you can practically obtain is with a CF card and adapter. That isn't something you'll want to try with a standard XP install, though(quite a cute trick with a stripped down Linux setup, however). And older notebook drive would probably make more sense.

 

[Peter]

Originally posted by: mikeford
eeeeek, isn't Samsung like the lowest quality drive brand?

Only in the world of internet forum parrots.

 

[mikeford]

Burned once 5 years ago, I haven't forgiven them. At a couple scrap places I visit, I have seen pallet bins full of drives with Samsung making up maybe half. OTOH plenty of seagates too.

A spare 20 GB from my wifes old archos mp3 player is a likely candidate.

 

[Peter]

Scrap bins are just a mirror of market share. Back in the days, when Seagate owned 95% of the HDD market, 95% of all broken HDDs happened to be Seagate. Quelle surprise ... still, public opinion in these days used to be "Seagate is ******".

With the Samsung drives being the undisputed leaders in quiet, low power AND at the same time cheap, they have a lot of market share in the low to midrange arena - and that's where the big numbers ship.