Shared Memory

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Jan 31, 2005 at 04:10:15PM -0500, Taavi Burns wrote:
> Well, I'm pretty sure that the electronics haven't used 12V for a good 15 years
> either; that would have been for the motors in ye olde 5.25" full-height HDs.
> Note that your CD and DVD drives are half-height.  You do the math.  :)
> 
> Since the newer drives are all small anyway, nobody has to use a 12V motor
> anymore, and the electronics are all 3.3V, too.
> 
> Neat detail, though.  :)

Well most 3.5" harddrives still list some current draw at 12V, while laptop
drives don't have anything other than 5V to draw on (no 12V on a
laptop drive connector).  However just checking the data sheet on the
new seagate NCQ enabled SATA drives (like their 400GB) it uses 13 to 30W
at 12V (up to 2.8A max it says with 13W typical).  I guess they haven't
gone to lower power yet (although SATA always calimed to reduce heat and
power use at some point).  I guess the lack of power supplies with real
SATA power connectors is a problem still.

Lennart Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml