I’ve been trying to reduce the power of my Home Server and Media Centre. Since my Power Meter debacle, I am now re-testing all the equipment and getting some rude shocks.
One of the positives out of this is that my 1TB Western Digital My Book Essential and 300GB Western Digital My Passport Essential both spin down and save power. On USB, this is a nice feature, as many of the generic external cages don’t spin the drive down.
The WD’s spin down on XP, Vista and Windows Home Server which is based on Server 2003. The timeout appears to be independent of the OS settings.
They support several power modes, and my current meter is not accurate enough to report which one they are in.
The WD 3/5″ Black is the 7200RPM desktop drive.
The WD 3.5″ Green is the 5400RPM drive generally in the MyBook
The WD 2.5″ Blue is the 5400RPM drive generally in the MyPassport
| Model | C’pcty | Operate | Idle | Stdby | Sleep |
| WD 3.5” Black | 1TB | 8.4 | 7.8 | 1 | 1 |
| WD 3.5” Green | 1TB | 5.4 | 2.8 | 0.4 | 0.4 |
| WD 2.5” Blue | 500GB | 2.5 | 0.85 | 0.25 | 0.1 |
The other thing I noted was that my new power meter (which is not rated as accurate below 10w) indicated that whilst sleeping, the 3.5″ and it’s power adapter were drawing less than 1w. The power adapter was only just warm, much better than the usual little heat wasters. Well done WD for killing the parasitic standby power.
Overall, they get my vote as low power green storage.
The Green 3.5″ and Blue 2.5″ drives are also very quiet – both operating and seek. The 2.5″ is quieter, but with half the capacity, may not stack up overall.
And you can always decode the Morse Code on the outside!