I'm wondering if I'll still enjoy the power saving benefit of a 6Gb/s Western Digital green drive if it is installed in a slot that only supports 3Gb/s. I understand that it will work but that the speed will be reduced. I can't find anything on the power consumption in this scenario. I'm planning on buying a 2TB drive for a home server that's always on so I want something that doesn't use much power.
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Yes, you will have the same power consumption of the drive. As for the speed of WD Green, it has Intellipower which means that if your application requires mostly sequential read/writes, then the drive will perform comparable to a 7,200 RPM drive. However, if your application performs mostly random mode operations, then the performance may drop by about 10% because of the latency time.
However, if you are planning to be leaving your system up all the time or are considering moving to a raid based system in the future, then you can take a look at WD Red, which are designed for such environment and might suit better for you. Here's a link if you want to check them out:
http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=b6Hnfe
Hope this helps.
Cheers! :)
Mighty_Miro_WD
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Probably you would - the power saving is due to lower spindle speeds and fairly aggressive idle settings in the firmware. In any case, while the interface is 'newer' the two standards are cross compatible, and you'd probably see the same benefits.
Journeyman Geek
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