Dot Hill Adds WD 1TB SATA “Green” HDDs

Dot Hill Systems Corp. is now offering WD RE2-GP 1 TB serial ATA (SATA) hard drives featuring Western Digital’s GreenPower technology across its entry-level line of RAID storage systems based on the Dot Hill Rapid Evolution (R/Evolution) Architecture.
 
The WD RE2-GP drives use on average 4 to 5 watts less than similar-size and format 7200 RPM drives from other suppliers resulting in an annual saving of $10 per year, per disk drive.  Additionally because the WD RE2-GP 1 TB SATA hard drives operate at an average of 10C less than 7200RPM drives they have a lower failure rate.  Combined, this drive can help any size of data center reduce annual energy costs and total cost of ownership.
 
The drive’s power efficiency is thanks to a number of key technologies, including WD’s IntelliPower, which balances spin speed, transfer rate, and caching algorithms designed to deliver both significant power savings and solid performance. This also uses less current during start up, which reduces the amount of current needed, and allows more drives to spin up simultaneously, resulting in faster system readiness. IntelliSeek optimizes seek-speeds to lower power consumption, noise and vibration. Active Power Management monitors a drive’s workload and automatically invokes idle mode whenever possible to reduce unnecessary power consumption. Drive recovery time from idle mode is less than one second.
 
The move to offer the WD RE2-GP, power-efficient drives is the latest in a series of initiatives undertaken by Dot Hill to help lower power consumption and improve efficiencies in the data center. In Q3 2008, the company introduced DC power support, enabling users to leverage DC power for improved energy efficiency and cost savings.
 
“We’re taking an active role in IT center management.  Last quarter we introduced support for DC power, this quarter we’ve added power-efficient drives.  Every data center should be looking at energy saving technologies, regardless of size.  These new offerings, multiplied across hundreds of drives, results in measurable savings,” said Cooper Cowart, Dot Hill’s vice president of marketing. “Offering these green drives is yet another example of our interest in providing our OEM customers with intelligent RAID storage solutions that unifies performance with energy efficiency and lowers total cost of ownership."
 
“We have been working closely with industry-leading storage system providers such as Dot Hill to deliver greener storage solutions into the data center,” said Tom McDorman, vice president and general manager of enterprise storage solutions for WD. “Since our WD RE2-GP 1 TB drives run cooler than other alternatives, they not only save money in energy costs, but generate less heat, resulting in greater reliability.”