Quote:
Originally Posted by Phoenix32
Well, UNLESS THESE ARE JUST REBADGED RE DRIVES, WD may have seen the light.
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They're closer to the RE-GP type than the RE. So they're a slower spindle speed (WD doesn't state the speed, calling them "Intellipower", but they're in the 5000-5900 RPM range).
I'm not sure WD "saw the light". They could have simply stopped playing games with the GP firmware and provided a utility that would allow the user to configure both auto-spindown and TLER (bonus points awarded for using industry-standard commands so 3rd-party utilities for Linux, *BSD, etc. would also work).
While WD is expanding their variants, Seagate has discontinued their Green drives, saying that the power savings compared to non-Green drives are trivial and are dwarfed by the lost productivity from waiting longer for data due to the slower speed of Green drives.
I'd like to see a smaller number of models (perhaps 5xxx RPM, 7200 RPM, and 10K/15K RPM) and a "pick your warranty" choice of 1/3/5 years, with industry-standard configuration utilities to select power-save / performance / RAID profiles. This would vastly reduce the number of SKU's and let WD concentrate on innovating via things like higher platter density (which has the useful side-effect of reducing power-per-TB).