An Analysis of Hard Drive Energy Consumption

The increasing storage capacity and necessary redundancy of data centers and other large-scale IT facilities has drawn attention to the issue of reducing the power consumption of hard drives. This work comprehensively investigates the power consumption of hard drives to determine typical runtime power profiles. We have instrumented at a fine-grained level and present our findings which show that (i) the energy consumed by the electronics of a drive is just as important as the mechanical energy consumption; (ii) the energy required to access data is affected by physical location on a drive; and (iii) the size of data transfers has measurable effect on power consumption.