[mythtv-users] My perfect HTPC

[Brian Wood]

On Thursday, October 07, 2010 01:37:29 pm Raymond Wagner wrote:
>   On 10/7/2010 15:02, Gavin Peters wrote:
> > On my BE, the six drives consume 5.5w each at idle, for 33W.  Divide
> > by 80%, and we're at 40w or so of load, call it 30 kwh/month.  If you
> > let the BE drives spin down when not in use, and record to SSD, you're
> > likely saving quite a bit of power.
> 
> Or you could record to normal hard drives, and spin them down when not
> in use.  Recording and playback is only going to occur for a couple
> hours a day, and even then you only need to spin up those you are
> actually using.  That 30kWh/mo is going to be cut down to well under
> 5kWh/mo.  Makes the SSD option considerably less economical.

I know there are some "hybrid" drives that are part SSD, and part conventional platters, essentially normal HDDs with huge 
caches (on the order of tens of gigabytes).

I wonder if we will ever see any of these units where the spinning platters can be spun down, and you are still able to 
read and write to the SSD portion, perhaps even with automatic transfer to the platters when they are spun up.

I suppose you could rig up something like this with a small conventional SSD and HDD and some software, but it sure would 
be convenient to have it pre-packaged.

But I still wonder about the effect on the service life of spinning down drives regularly. Most electronics is happiest 
when run 24/7, but conventional HDDs that can be spun down may leave the electronics on and just stop the motor.

Did the Google study address this? I don;t recall seeing it in there, but I did not read it thoroughly.