Reducing power consumption in the data center has  moved from a nice-to-have to a necessity.  No surprise that a ‘green’ drive sounds appealing for servers and storage systems.

Drive manufacturers have responded with new drives that use much less power than previous models. 

Just be careful not to throw the enterprise ‘baby’ out with the bathwater.  Green enterprise drives use less power, but are still enterprise drives under the covers.  That means enterprise-level performance, reliability, RAID integration features. 

IT administrators that focus on low power at the expense of other features have gotten burned with drives that may be labeled enterprise, but don’t cut the mustard when it comes to getting the job done.

Seagate enterprise drives, like the new Constellation drive, have ‘green’ features like PowerTrim and PowerChoice that reduce power while still meeting enterprise server and multi-drive storage requirements.

Photo courtesy of ispeech.org