Power Up In Standby (PUIS) on WD drives

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bgiddins
Posts: 175
Joined: Sun Sep 14, 2008 1:04 am
Location: Australia

Power Up In Standby (PUIS) on WD drives

Post by bgiddins » Thu Oct 16, 2008 6:44 pm

I just received two Western Digital Caviar Green 1TB WD10EADS drives. There are some jumper pins on the drive that control some settings, but this one caught my eye - Power Up In Standby (PUIS). This apparently allows the drive to turn, but remain at standby rather than go to idle - so a startup power of 0.4W rather than 2.8W.

Piddly difference I know - but I might have a play with it and see what the impact is. The two drives will be a RAID 1 data partition, not used for booting the OS, so potentially they could use this PUIS feature and remain in standby until I actually need to access the drives. It's only saving ~5W from my idle power consumption (yet to be measured), but if it's not going to have a material impact on performance except for the first disk access, then I don't mind. Could also see it being a useful setting on a multi-disk NAS that might get switched on/off regularly if you have everything plugged into a powerboard like I do, allowing me to switch EVERYTHING off when I'm done with the computer for the evening.

Note that I posted this in the Green forum before jumping on me and telling me it's a dumb idea :roll:

edit - apparently WD didn't include the jumper cap for the pins, so it might be a while before I try this.

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