What is Digg?37 Comments
- cyberdork, on 10/10/2007, -1/+20That's cool. I never realized how much power a PC consumes until mine broke down last year which I never bothered to replace, solely using my laptop since then. My electricity consumption dropped by 15-20% (the PC was running 24/7). After noticing that, I used a meter to check all my other electronic equipment and also found out that my f#$%ing Logitech 2.1 speakers even when switched off consumed so much power that it was responsible for around 10% of my entire electricity consumption! Next I replaced my light bulbs and connected my TV, console, DVD etc to a master/slave power stick, so that when the TV is turned off or to standby all other video equipment will be separated from the power.
I started with all this in February and my electricity consumption is down by 35%, next year it will be around 50% of what I used last year. Unfortunately you won't save exactly that much money, since a big chunk of your monthly energy bill consists of fixed costs. The 35% decrease in consumption will save me around 20% on the bill.
My next file and webserver will be my old laptop which consumes about one tenth of what a standard PC does. In combination with those "eco-friendly" harddisks it would be perfect. - msaleem, on 10/10/2007, -3/+17Environmental news and breakthroughs don't get enough attention. Thanks for submitting this and thanks to ecogeek for writing it. Every small step helps and sites like EcoGeek and TreeHugger seem to be on the blogging forefront of environmental issues.
- maheshee11, on 10/10/2007, -1/+8Thanks, msaleem. I too have been witnessing the same thing, and I fully agree with you that "Environmental news and breakthroughs don't get enough attention." But in my little way I have been trying to attract people's attention towards serious environmental issues and posting stories from TreeHugger and EcoGeek on digg. A couple of them have reached the digg front page too.
- SpaceDreamer, on 10/10/2007, -2/+6it's "Tera" , not "Terra"
- meshman, on 10/10/2007, -4/+7What's a 320gb Terrabyte?
- PecanHead, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3> EcoGeek and TreeHugger seem to be on the blogging forefront of environmental issues
Wow - who would have thought... - cyberdork, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3It was my file and webserver, my burning station etc. I usually use my Apple laptop in the living room, and connected to the PC (which is in a different room) via remote desktop or smb. I also accessed it remotely from work or from other places. So it became normal to just keep it running. Stupid, I know!
- bumpinvolvo, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2I'm all for anything energy saving. If not for the environment, at least for the small amount I'll save in my electricity bill.
- Guard, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2I've looked all over for this... what's the added price on these?
- rbond, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2You could take this one step farther. If you use an Ethernet that supports waking up from standby, you could put the PC on hibernate it and waking it up by using the "magic packet". Sometimes it can be a pain in the ass to set this up, but once this works, it can save you even a little bit more money. Some info: http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/index.php/id;1342230093;fp;2;fpid;1294003727
- JavaWarlord, on 10/10/2007, -2/+4It's a play on words. Terra is the Latin word for earth.
- cyberdork, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1I wanted to try that, but my mainboard was too old and didn't support wake on LAN.
Another good alternative for a server are these cheap NAS by Synology.
http://www.synology.com - guffly, on 05/29/2009, -0/+1this is really cool... it's amazing how much power things like computers can consume. on our profile, we uploaded info on solar powered power pack for computers and anything else... it's really cool to see how far solar power has come and how far we can go with it!
- dajuggernaut, on 10/10/2007, -1/+2I don't want to hear about it until they start making hard-drives out of recycled McDonald's cheeseburgers.
- swoopdog, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1this one will if enough people see it.
everyone likes HDDs and the environment! - Jazzillion, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Sustainability in all forms of progress is an inevitable trend. I imagine hemp plastic-type materials as well as other hemp utilizations will lead the way in casings, circuit boards, and various other microprocessing pieces. It is the only plant that can effectively revolutionize the technological industry to be sustainable.
- AaronCompNetSys, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1I also use an old Dell laptop as a Torrent box, SAN, XBMC share, Xbox360 share, MrPostman, Web server, alarm clock, and video/audio encoder. The idea was it should be low power, but it might not be. The SAN has a new Western Digital drive, dunno if it has this technology. I think I'll get a power meter today.
- cyberdork, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Wait a second, so if a standard external USB hard drive consumes around 26W, then these eco-friendly disks save you 10W. That's a little more than the normal standby power consumption of an electronic device (TVs, DVD players etc). So these disks are not really that revolutionary!
- Error601, on 10/10/2007, -1/+2More proof that the "green" marketing ploy works. Amazing.
- meshman, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Sorry, I should have mentioned that I don't care.
- louiedog, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1My computer is made out of hemp and runs on water. Of course the government will digg down this comment.
- Error601, on 10/10/2007, -1/+2You really can't be that clueless to think that's what I was talking about can you?
- cyberdork, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Hey, I've got an humming, heating and chugging 250GB LaCie Porsche!
*goes looking for his above mentioned meter*
Switched off: 7W
Switched on (idle): 14W
Switched on (copying): 26W
Switched on (sleep): 9W - tablatronix, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1But are they RoHS ?
http://www.rohs.gov.uk/ - PinkFloydFan, on 10/10/2007, -1/+1Eco-friendly computer nerd news? It doesn't get any better than that!
- Subterfug, on 10/10/2007, -0/+0If this means that those Hard Drives will run cooler, then it should be pretty popular. Hard Drives really push up ambient temps in a PC.
- HanSolo69, on 10/10/2007, -1/+1I can get a 320GB terabyte hard drive? what a deal!
- Erowid, on 10/10/2007, -1/+1I can picture it now: Datacenters filled with laptops instead of server racks... Beautiful..... Beyond that, I just did a quick search on tigerdirect, and biggest laptop drive I could find was 250 gigs... I wonder if these 1TB "green drives" or whatever will use 4x the amount of energy as a laptop drive...
- inactive, on 10/10/2007, -1/+1There is nothing eco-friendly about computers. Get used to it :)
- DBrez8, on 10/10/2007, -0/+0Another recently released Eco-Friendly external HDD
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/hard-drives/kangurus-eco-drive-is-the-worlds-most-energy-efficient-external-hard-drive-280774.php - swoopdog, on 10/10/2007, -1/+1hell yes ec0-drives!
- HappyScrappy, on 10/10/2007, -1/+1As much as I like WD, this is just a rebrand of their excellent Caviar SE16 drives. They always took less power than many competitors, now they're just marketing it.
I just bought a 750GB SE16 (the super fast AAKS), so I don't need one of these. - davidconnell, on 10/10/2007, -3/+2OK, So this subject brings up a question for me, and thats vampire machines--you know stuff that uses energy when it's plugged in, but not actually running. Why can't these genius designers come up with a solution for that problem, which seems to be a big one? It seems to me with advances ion lithiums the power needed to sync my TiVo could be taken care of that way. Yes, no?
BTW. This hard drive rocks the house. I fear for the amount of energy my LaCie Porsche hard drive sucks up, the way it hums, heats, and chugs! - lhospital, on 10/10/2007, -1/+0dugg for toilet happy ass ad on the side.
- corvairkid, on 10/10/2007, -2/+0Instead of formatting it, you do some terraforming.
*crickets* - Error601, on 10/10/2007, -8/+3You've GOT to be kidding me. People are really suckers for this stuff. If you want low power consumption drives, just look at laptop drives. They're driven by being able to market the highest battery life.
- Beaver6813, on 10/10/2007, -6/+1You had your PC running 24/7...why!?
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