Power Consumption

You can refer to our article called Hard Disk Drive Power Consumption Measurements: X-bit’s Methodology Indepth for details on this test. We’ll just list the specific modes we measure the power consumption in:

• Start (the current the drive consumes when speeding up its spindle)
• Idle (the drive is not accessed at all, but it is turned on and ready to work)
• Random Read and Write
• Sequential Read and Write

Let’s check out each mode one by one.

The Hitachi consumes the least amount of power when spinning the platters up. The Fujitsu is the most voracious here.

In idle mode, when the drive is doing nothing but rotating its platters, the Fujitsu proves to be the most economical. The Hitachi has low power consumption, too. The Seagate need considerably more power in this mode.

The HDDs all have similar results when doing random-address operations. The 160GB Seagate is just a bit better and the Fujitsu consumes somewhat more than the others.

The HDDs fall into two groups at sequential operations. The Hitachi and Fujitsu are economical whereas the two drives from Seagate are rather voracious. It looks like Seagate’s controller needs more power than the controllers of the competitor products. Why do we suspect it? Besides the controller, the spindle motor is the only component that consumes a substantial amount of power in a HDD and we could estimate its consumption in the two previous tests. As opposed to random-address operations, the controller takes an active part in the HDD’s operation at sequential operations.

By the way, you can also note that reading took more power than writing in the previous test, but now the HDDs consume about the same amount of power for both reading and writing.