Spinning modern 3" drive consumption - under 5W. Spinning modern 2" drive consumption - under 2W.

Average current CPU+RAM+Chipset = 60-150W.

Well, I am not surprised that customers do not see the need for their gear. After all, just improving the processing core and FC chipsets can provide much better power savings (you used to be able to boil a kettle on some FC chipsets in the past).

The only place where such tech makes sense are large media libraries for Video on Demand, though once again, specialised software running on commodity hardware is likely to deliver better power savings and higher drive MTBF than such appliance.

Whilt I agree, and have done for a number of years, that Copan have a great product and that it is widely unknown or uncared about, how many freebies did you get for writing this advertising fluff for them??

Must have saved them a bundle on getting some 'independant' analyst to write a paper extolling their virtues.

Mine's the one with CYNIC on the back in big letters

Who in their right mind would buy something that acknowledged that the drives were packed too close together?

What stops all of the drives from spinning up at the same time? Would it be a limit on the power supply, or is that rated for the max draw, and therefore rather in-efficient?

Random access being what it is, from time to time you can expect to see what looks like big co-incidences, and therefore still need to take account of the worst case -max power, max cooling, or else throttle the peak access, and who is going to accept a product that is deliberately crippled?

Don't get me wrong, I think they have some good ideas, but seriously, who cares about a little floor space?