Huawei may have used a very clever trick to make hard disks use less power — spin-on-demand disk drives may well compete with tape on performance, but at what cost? (www.techradar.com)

submitted 8 months ago by yogthos@lemmy.ml to c/technology@lemmy.ml

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[-] ZeroHora@lemmy.ml 11 points 8 months ago

"but at what cost?"

[-] GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Idk why nobody made it before. If you have 2 drives you usually only use the second HDD for data storage and sometimes games. This feature should have been there for years already (not as the default though cuz performance)

[-] catloaf@lemm.ee 22 points 8 months ago

We have. Spinning down disks not being accessed has been a thing for decades.

But it's rarely used, because even if you the user aren't reading or writing files, all the background systems are still using the disk. And spinning up and down is more west and tear on a drive than constant spinning.

[-] cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 8 points 8 months ago

I got a drive over 10 years ago that had some very aggressive power management by default. It would park the heads and spin down less than a minute after the last access. It was so bad that it would kill the drives within a couple of years if you didn't disable it. I found out about it a couple weeks after getting the drive and it already had more load/unload cycles than a disk that's been in normal use for years.

[-] legios@aussie.zone 4 points 8 months ago

It was a problem with early WD green drives IIRC. The power management was exceptionally aggressive and caused massive issues when put in to any RAID-like set up. You could override it though generally.

[-] Bitrot@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 8 months ago

Never glanced at Windows power options, eh?

[-] GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml 0 points 8 months ago

I don't use Windows much and I don't remember such feature

[-] Bitrot@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 8 months ago

Never configured udisks, eh?

[-] GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml -2 points 8 months ago

What is udisks? I've only heard of gdisk or whatever the name of that industry standard Linux partition manager thing is

[-] Supermariofan67@programming.dev 5 points 8 months ago

If only that comment contained a link explaining exactly what it is...

[-] GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml -3 points 8 months ago

Already answered this kind of question

this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2024

14 points (76.9% liked)

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