drive for folding

[GJS1]

Hi, I'm looking for a reasonably cheap drive to start putting in dedicated folding computers so don't want it to use a lot of power. I was thinking the system may be bottlenecked by a usb 2.0 pendrive and had considered an esata pendrive but I'm sure I heard they had a life span or a certain ammount of reads and writesand I don't want it to sie after a short time - I was looking for some advice on what energy efficient drives would be suitable for using in a farm and what kind of power consumption a normal (dare I say) 7.2k rpm drive had, thanks