WD Caviar & RE2 GreenPower 1TB HDs

Considering the "green" angle of these GreenPower drives, it wouldn't be prudent for us to end this article without some power consumption measurements. We used a P3 Kill-A-Watt electricity usage monitor in order to get some idea of how much less power the GreenPower drives require compared to the other 1TB drive we tested in this review, the Seagate Barracuda ES.2. We used the P3 Kill-A-Watt to measure total system power consumption at idle and at load (which consisted of running some intense disk benchmarks).

Power Consumption As Reported by P3 Kill-A-Watt in Watts; Lower is "Greener"

When we compared the 1TB Seagate Barracuda ES.2's specifications to these two 1TB GreenPower drives, we noticed that the 1TB ES.2 requires about four more Watts of power for both idle and seek modes. With this information in mind, we weren't surprised to see how the power consumption results with the 1TB Caviar GP installed compared to those of the 1TB ES.2. The system pulled four less Watts during load and five less Watts at idle with the Caviar GP installed versus the ES.2. What surprised us was that the system used even less power when the 1TB RE2-GP was tested.

We realize that in the big scheme of things 5-10 Watts may not matter to many people, but you have to keep in mind that the RE2-GP is intended for large data servers. The power savings, and resulting cost savings, can really add up in a data center with hundreds of drives running 24/7 for a whole year.