Hitachi, which is a major electronics producer, has announced recently its new line of energy efficient hard drives called Deskstar P7K500. The new hard drives will provide the same productivity, but using less energy. Hitachi plans to launch the new line by the end of this year.
To give you an opinion, P7K500 series feature single or dual platter, 7200 RPM w/ 4.2ms average latency, 8MB of cache per platter and come in capacities of 250/320/400/500GB. The power consumption ranges between 3.6 - 4.8W when idle or 6.4 - 8.2W under load.
To achieve such performances Hitachi used switching regulators instead of linear regulators for more efficient voltage conversion, combined with SoC (System on a Chip) design that reduces power consumption. Beside, Hitachi's Advanced Power Management introduces two new working modes - Unload Idle and Low RPM Idle. The former one reduces the consumption with 11 percent, while latter delivers a 44 percent power saving.
Buying those hard drives could decrease your bills and also would make your PCs less noisy. Thus, the P7K500 series will be a good deal. No words on pricing yet, but the hard drives will be very competitive for their individual market segment.
via Arstechnica
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