Adaptec joins the green team with energy-saving RAID controller

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 04 September 2008 02:31

Science - Energy

Updated versions of Adaptec's RAID controllers deliver power savings by taking advantage of green features in the latest drives. Energy use by the drives can be cut by up to 70 percent, the company claims.

The idea of spinning down a hard drive to save energy is well known to notebook users. But normal practice with storage that's externally attached to servers is to keep the drives running at all times.

In many circumstances, there's either no opportunity to put drives to sleep or the delay caused by waiting for them to spin up causes an unacceptable performance hit. But there are functions - such as file and print servers, email archiving, second-tier storage and disk-to-disk backup - that aren't in continual, round-the-clock use, and that's what Adaptec is targeting.

Typical drive power consumption is in the 10-12W range. Any drive can be spun down, reducing the power draw to around 3W. Trouble is, it takes 20-40 seconds to spin up again. But some newer SATA drives - and forthcoming SAS models - also have a standby mode that cuts power use to 5-7W, yet only takes 7-10 seconds to resume normal operation. This is achieved by reducing the spindle speed, explained Demitri Christodoulou, Adaptec's Asia Pacific regional manager.

Reducing the power used by the drives also reduces the amount of heat being generated, so there is a flow-on reduction in the energy used to cool the premises.

So which of Adaptec's RAID controllers include this new feature? See page two.