Re: Low power hard drive for HTPC.

there is no significant difference in power
between the different drives. The max power draw
happens during spindle spin-up, after that, it
pretty much comes out as a wash. One thing some of
the HTPC drives do )or set-top box HDDs is that
they skip some of the ECC to increase capacity. My
opinion is that this is saving in the wrong places
because it affects reliability.

Keep in mind also that there is no such thing as
simultaneous reading/writing on HDDs, it can
buffer writes and then use idle phases to execute
them (if you allow write caching), otherwise, even
though the SATA interface is dual ported, you can
only read or write at any time, which means that
if you include random access latencies, you need
sequential transfers of ~50 MBps in order not to
starve concurrent 10 MBps read and write
transfers.