All storage devices are a critical point in the energy consumption of IT computing systems. Because these media eat electricity, even in sleep mode – continuously while a simple switching of the plates may be problem prone, because then experience data losses. Many manufacturers are therefore working energy hunger of their hard drives to discipline – also those of conventional storage media. Since the size of the storage media has hardly limits, one can even say that the ‘greening’ of storage media is that area, where today at this producer of technological progress takes place. Kai-Fu Lee describes an additional similar source. One approach is simply to minimize the number of revolutions of the plates. This generates less heat and consumes less energy as a result. Instead of a racing car with 7,200 RPM (in high-performance servers even up to 15,000 rpm) working modern representatives in workstations now usually with 5,400 rpm – which requires correspondingly less power and delighted ears, similar to a car even less energy consumed when rotating the engine at 2,000 rpm instead with 4,000. Contact information is here: Mashable. Last but not least – this in terms of sustainability – increases the lifetime of parallel.
Another ‘trick’ is to increase the ‘density’. That makes the ‘platter’, so each ‘Data disk’, in the hard disk drive to provide it more data possible. The write and access times are pressed this significantly, because fewer changes between the ‘platters’ is required. 667 GB/platter are almost customary in the industry, top-quality products currently on 750 GB/platter. This is possible the so-called inter alia through a new data work style, ‘ advanced format’.
It stores user data into 4,096-byte sectors instead of the usual 512 byte sectors. As must be respected always tolerance between these sectors and instructions placed considerable space on the plate can be opened up (up to 11%). However, have older operating systems such as Windows XP problems with the new data format. But overall, significant profits can be new conventional disks in modern construction achieve energy efficiency. Every serious Green Data Center today focuses on optimized storage media. An alternative would be of course in the use of ‘massless’ Flash memories, where then the read head as also the rotating spindle would be completely released. Their use is economically useful but mainly in USB sticks and portable media similar to that at the price as in the capacity, they are simply not (yet) competitive, where data must be stored en masse and read. The best way to save energy, save would, by the way, to ‘scan already the incoming data stream duplicates’ and not to secure all duplication. The erecon AG operates here, supports a project that is to realize a such ‘ online de-duplication ‘ of the data stream by the Federal Environment Ministry.