A lesson from light beer
Calling a disk drive “green” is like calling a light beer “healthy”. In both cases, the means to achieve a goal are being confused with the goal itself.
Just as switching from regular to light beer might help someone (a little) improve their health, lower power disk drives can reduce the power consumption (and carbon footprint) of a datacenter, DVR or PC.
Seagate gets this. They don’t slap a big “Green” label on their drives. Yet in general, Seagate’s products are the most power efficient at any specific performance/capacity point. That means that using Seagate drives can result in the lowest overall power consumption for your system, whatever it may be.
Look beyond the label of your storage components when trying to configure the most power efficient solution.
Agree or disagree? Let’s discuss this further.
2 responses so far ↓
ジェイソン (Jason) // May 27, 2008 at 9:59 am
You forget that people want to feel good about themselves when they make a purchase. This is true for both consumers and corporations.
Here in Japan, companies will slap an “Eco” (Japan’s way of saying Ecologically Friendly) sticker on everything from light bulbs to margerine, even if it’s no better than the product a company produced ten years ago. National is a prime example of this with their air conditioners … same power consumption, same BTU ratings, same mechanical components … the only thing different from the ‘98 model is a few circuit boards and a green sticker that resembles the Intel logo.
That said, I agree that Seagate has some of the best power consumption out there. After switching a few notebooks from Hitachi to Seagate, the battery life was noticably better (about 20 minutes on an older P4 mobile).
Tyson // May 30, 2008 at 1:30 pm
“Just as switching from regular to light beer might help someone (a little) improve their health, lower power disk drives can reduce the power consumption.”
I love this analogy. Great post … keep bringing common sense to green marketing!
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