Western Digital introduces new GreenPower HDDs

On Monday, Western Digital introduced its new family of hard drives that will use up to 40 percent less energy then comparable products.

The new GreenPower line will ship in capacities available from 320GB up to 1TB with a desktop version of the Caviar scheduled for an August release. Enterprise and consumer electronic versions of GreenPower SATA drives are expected to ship later this quarter. Estimates from Western Digital show that the new line of drives could save £5 per drive, per year in electricity and help reduce CO2 emissions by up to 600 metric tons per 100,000 drives.

With some data centres having thousands of hard drives, potential savings could be up in the hundreds of thousands of pounds a year range if the entire centre ran GreenPower drives. Home users could shave a couple of pounds a month off their home energy bills by migrating over to the less power hungry drives.

The new technologies behind the power savings are IntelliPower, IntelliPark, and IntelliSeek. These named features fine-tune the balance of spin speed, transfer rate and cache size, automatically unload the heads during idle to reduce the aerodynamic drag, and calculate the optimum seek speeds to help lower noise, vibration, and power usage.

With lower CO2 emissions due to less energy requirements, would you be willing to switch over to the new GreenPower drives to reduce your carbon footprint? Discuss in our forums.