Storage

Western Digital announces ‘green’ hard drives

Western Digital, a leading global hard drive manufacturer, today announced a new environmentally friendly GreenPower™ family of WD® desktop, enterprise, CE and external Hard Drive products. The new GreenPower (GP) family will ship in capacities from 320 gigabytes (GB) to one terabyte (TB), and will save up to 40% in hard drive power consumption, or as much as $10 per drive per year.

Based on extensive customer input toward supporting ENERGY STAR 4.0 compliance and incorporating the latest in engineering technology, WD has delivered the first 3.5-inch hard drive platform designed with power savings as the primary attribute. The GreenPower family gives customers more choices when it comes to purchasing hard drives. The initial drive that will take advantage of WD’s new GreenPower technology is the WD Caviar GP. The WD Caviar GP 1 TB hard drive will first ship in July in the My Book™ range of storage appliances, with 1 TB desktop channel shipments following in August. GreenPower versions of WD RE enterprise drives and WD AV consumer electronics drives will ship in volume within calendar Q3.

ENERGY STAR 4.0 computing systems are designed to enable organizations to minimize their carbon footprint as well as realize significant savings in electricity costs. By WD estimates, in certain applications, the new GreenPower platform can save greater than $10 per drive per year in electricity costs. For example, 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.

Other 1 TB hard drives have a typical power consumption of 13.5 watts. Replacing these drives with WD GreenPower hard drives can cut that rating by over 5 watts, significantly reducing heat, power consumption and cost.

Ensuring Energy Efficiencies:

The GreenPower Platform is designed with power savings as the primary attribute. GreenPower drives from WD deliver exceptional power conservation, ultra-cool, quiet operation and solid performance.

The following technologies enable WD’s GP platform:

IntelliPower™: A fine-tuned balance of spin speed, transfer rate and cache size designed to deliver both significant power savings and solid performance.

IntelliPark™: Delivers lower power consumption by automatically unloading the heads during idle to reduce aerodynamic drag.

IntelliSeek™: Calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise and vibration.

Environment, Hard Drive, Storage, technology Western Digital

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