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When we talk about hard drives, we usually tend to think about a PC.
But the fact is that hard drives are used at a lot many places other than in a PC.
Western Digital manufactures hard drives with special features targeting audio video professionals.
The GreenPower WD AV-GP (WD20EVDS) is one such drive with a 2.0 TB capacity, and boasts of lower power consumption than the earlier versions.
Incidentally, this is the second 2.0 TB hard drive in the market from WD, the earlier one being WD20EADS.
The Green moniker means that this is tuned to consume less power and is therefore energy efficient.
Would that affect the performance in any way? Is this drive any different from the other and less expensive counterparts?
We'll find out as we put it through our test suite.
Drive Features
The WD20EVDS boasts of a 2.0 TB capacity - large enough to store everything you throw in it. To give you a measure of this capacity, you can store up to 400,000 digital photos, 500,000 MP3 songs, 150 hours of digital video (DV), 770 hours of DVD quality video or 240 hours of HD video. The large capacity is advantageous also because of the growing size of operating systems - Vista and Windows 7 take over 6 GB. Versions of Linux also take huge amount of space.
This 3.5-inch drive features perpendicular recording technology, meaning a greater areal density - more data per given area of the platter, thus reducing the number of platters, which in turn, reduces the amount of heat it generates. Speaking of platters, we have four in this drive, each with a huge 500 GB. The spindle has a variable rotational speed of up to 7,200 rpm and the drive has a large 32 MB buffer for uninterrupted data transfer. As you can see in the above photo, the drive features a SATA interface - this is the faster and now common 3.0 Gb/s SATA-II. This drive features reduced power consumption by up to 40% than standard desktop hard drives using WD's SilkStream, IntelliPark, IntelliSeek, IntelliPower and Pre-emptive Wear Leveling (PWL). IntelliPark reduces power consumption by automatically unloading the heads during idle to reduce aerodynamic drag. This improves the life of the drive and makes it more reliable. IntelliPower feature is a fine-tune balance of spin speed, transfer rate and caching algorithms, which together make sure that you get good balance of significant power savings and solid performance.
Like most WD drives, it too features Intelliseek - an algorithm that calculates the optimum seek speeds to lower the power consumption, noise and vibration. All this translates to a lower power consumption, to help keep down your electricity bills, especially if the PC is on 24/7, and a silent hard drive that is a boon for any HTPC.
Since this drive is aimed at AV professionals, it also features SilkStream technology, which is an algorithm that optimizes continuous digital video playback of up to 12 simultaneous HD streams. Since SilkStream is compatible with ATA streaming command set, CE (Consumer Electronics) customers can use standard streaming management and error recovery options. Using Pre-emptive Wear Leveling, the arm of the drive frequently sweeps across the platter to reduce uneven wear on the drive surface, common to AV streaming applications. Source :- http://www.techtree.com/ |
