14 DAY TRIAL // There is an increasingly strong current in our world today that starts reflecting a little bit on the computer hardware manufacturers and that current is the need to make equipment more environment-friendly and more power efficient. Hoping to ride the green wave, the hard disk drive manufacturer Western Digital announced a new family of products named GreenPower. As a hard disk drive is one of the most power hungry pieces of hardware in a typical desktop or laptop computer (at least when it is in full load) more and more manufacturers are developing technologies to make them as energy efficient as possible without affecting performance.
The GreenPower hard disk drives will ship in capacities ranging from 320GB to 1TB and according to Western Digital claims they will use 40 percent less power than the competing drives with similar capacities and features. The first from the GreenPower family, the WD Caviar GP hard disk drive is an external storage drive and it is scheduled to hit the market this month. About the energy saving features of this drive, WD said in a press release that using an 1TB GreenPower drive is "the equivalent of taking your car off the road for 14 days each year." The more believable claim is that you will save "up to $10 per drive per year in electricity costs." Looking back to some hard numbers, we find that the typical every day disk drive needs about 13.5W, while the GreenPower drives only consume about 8.5 watts. Western Digital says that "a data center with 10,000 drives can save $100,000 in annual energy costs, and reduce CO2 emission by 600 metric tons-the equivalent of taking almost 400 cars off the road for a year."
A number of patented Western Digital technologies found their way in the GreenPower series and the manufacturer claims that they will help improve both user experience and energy efficiency. IntelliPower is one of these technologies and it balances the spin speed, transfer rate and cache size in order to deliver significant power savings and solid performance. IntelliSeek is used to calculate optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise and vibration, while IntelliPark delivers lower power consumption by automatically unloading the heads during idle to reduce aerodynamic drag.
The GreenPower family hard disk drives are all Energy Star 4.0-compliant and the first drive from this family will be found in the My Book range of storage appliances, with 1 TB desktop channel shipments following in August. For the enterprises and the consumer electronics channels, Western Digital plans to start shipping GreenPower drives within calendar Q3, the manufacturer said.