With the growing number of set-top boxes and surveillance systems using hard disks that usually run 24/7, the growing problem with these is their energy usage, particularly at a time when we are trying to cut back energy usage to reduce emissions from power plants and overcome growing electricity prices.  Samsung aims to tackle this issue with the announcement of its One Terabyte capacity EcoGreen Hard Disk drive. 

Samsung claims this EcoGreen F1 drive uses 15% less energy compared to other low-powered 1TB drives and uses half the energy of traditional 1TB drives.  A few ways it achieves this is by increasing the platter density to 334GB to reduce the number of platters to 3 and reducing the rotational speed to 5400RPM.  With fewer and denser platters and a large 32MB buffer, the drive operates with fewer parts and helps improve the drive's speed and performance, which should help compensate for the lower spindle speed.  Also, as most set-top boxes and surveillance equipment generally do far less seeking than drives used for operating systems and servers, the lower rotational speed will unlikely have any effect.

As this EcoGreen drive is targeted at home theatre PCs and AV equipment, Samsung has implemented its SilentSeek and NoiseGuard technologies to silence the drive.  Its interface features 3.0Gbps SATA.  The EcoGreen F1 will launch in the second quarter this year.