Intellipower?

I

its4thecolony

Weaksauce
Joined
Mar 27, 2010
Messages
118
hey guys, is intellipower really another word for slower, i dont really understand the concept. Someone please enlighten me with you wisdom!
 
I think you are referring to WD's Intellipower(?). It varies the rotational speed of the drive between 5400 and 7200RPM and so tries to reduce power usage whilst causing minimal performance impact. If you are looking at the Green drives I assume performance is not your top priority, if it is you probably want SSDs anyway.
 
Some of their ads stated that it varied the speed, but all the tests seemed to indicate that the Greens were simply 5400RPM.
 
It varies the rotational speed of the drive between 5400 and 7200RPM
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Are you sure? AFAIK no drive does this!

I thought the Intellipower was seek performance setting; either use high voltage, high performance, high noise; or use lower voltage, lower performance but also lower noise. Much like "amset" to set acoustic management.
 
Some text that supports my thoughts:

"IntelliPark 'parks' inactive cylinder heads, and to reduce aerodynamic drag on the spinning platters. IntelliSeek calculates seek speeds to reduce power consumption, noise and vibration and optimise performance."
 
It varies the rotational speed of the drive between 5400 and 7200RPM
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That was the marketing. The drives were actually fixed speed but they did not want to specify the speed as 5400 or 5900 instead of 7200.
 
BTW, I have found that my 5400 2TB green WD drive is faster than my 7200.11 Seagate 750GB drives. In both STR and seek. I was expecting it to be noticeably slower.
 
drescherjm said:
I thought the reduced rotational speed would negate that.
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These numbers are hypothetical, but i think it gets the point across.
If Drive A's platters are twice as dense as compared to Drive B's, then Drive A's platter only needs to spin half as fast as Drive B's for the heads to read the same amount of data.
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Now IIRC the WD20EADS uses 4x 500gb Platters and the 7200.11 750 uses 3x 250gb platters.

So not only are the platters twice as dense but there is actually one more platter and one more head for data to be read from.

Also the drive only spins 25% slower than a 7200.11
 
sub.mesa said:
Are you sure? AFAIK no drive does this!

I thought the Intellipower was seek performance setting; either use high voltage, high performance, high noise; or use lower voltage, lower performance but also lower noise. Much like "amset" to set acoustic management.
Click to expand...

Some older IBMs can. They can be set by Adaptec raid controllers to a lower RPM, its treated like an intermediate mode between full speed and standby in the power management options.

If WDs decription is BS then that would go some way too explaining why the Adaptec cannot set low RPM on the EADS and EARS.
 
Now IIRC the WD20EADS uses 4x 500gb Platters and the 7200.11 750 uses 3x 250gb platters.

So not only are the platters twice as dense but there is actually one more platter and one more head for data to be read from.
Click to expand...

Makes total sense. For some reason I thought the 7200.11 750s were 2 platter drives using 375GB platters.
 
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