Power consumption of scsi vs ssd drives?

[speters]

I have an external raid 0 made up of 6x 36gb Atlas 15k II connected to a ATTO UL 5d, I use this for a Photoshop scratch drive as well as storing my working files. I work and home so I have this raid on most of the time. Plus I have 4 sata II drives inside of Mac Pro. My electric bill has always been around $300 month and I am starting to wonder if maybe all of those drives are eating up some juice? When I built this raid these where the fastest drives, now with the ssd drives I could probably get two of those and stripe them and get close to the same speed as the 6 drives, but I am thinking that this could help cut down on the electric bill? Any thoughts?

Steve

 

[Transporteur]

A single SSD uses about 10W tops, your 15k drives should easily consume 20W each.

I don't think that your external RAID really adds to your electric bill, though.
Domestic appliances generally are the biggest consumers in an average household.

If you really want to cut down your electric bill, I recommend a small electric meter with which you can measure each of your devices separately.

 

[dmr727]

I'm sure the drives don't help, but I can't see them doing $300 worth of damage in a month either. I've bought a couple of these from Amazon, and they're great for getting an idea of power consumption from your various devices:

http://www.amazon.com/P3-Internatio...MDBU/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1295108399&sr=8-1

That way you have some real numbers to work with before you drop the cash on an SSD setup.

 

[MagicBoy]

The Hard Drives are a drop in the ocean compared to other stuff you will likely have running. 40% of my monthly electricity bill is from the water heater which runs on cheap rate overnight electricity. I doubt that my Mac Mini with the FW800 drives attached to it uses as much in a month as the water heater does in a couple of days.

 

[JamesMB]

You could shut those 6 drives off and you probably wouldn't be able to see a difference in your bill. Assuming that your drives are 20W (6X20=120W), and your ac is 120V then the draw from those drives is 1 amp, a little less if your voltage is higher and a little more if your voltage is lower. I=P/E. Where I is Current/Amps, P is power/watts, and E is voltage. Would you save some money with 2 10W SSD's? Sure, but I doubt that you would ever be able to see it.