Western Digital Goes Green with GreenPower Hard Drives

Western Digital just announced the new GreenPower family of hard drives. GreenPower is meant to give customers a choice in hard drives. Among the top factors for deciding on products is efficiency. The new GreenPower hard drives are Energy Star 4.0 compliant, and save up to 40% in power consumption. That is approximately $10 per drive per year.

The new GreenPower drives ship out soon, but will only be available as 1 GB external hard drives but 1 GB desktop hard drives are expected to ship sometime in August. The new technology behind these drives which is used to save power is IntelliPower. IntelliPower monitors system activity and usage to change the spin speed of the disk as well as save power when possible without hurting performance. Another new technology is IntelliPark, IntelliPark "Delivers lower power consumption by automatically unloading the heads during idle to reduce aerodynamic drag." Last is IntelliSeek. IntelliSeek calculates the optimum seek speed for the drive, which will lower power consumption as well as reducing noise and vibration.

Not only are these hard drives meant save power, but they are also meant to make a smaller impact on the environment. These drives make less of an impact, and it is estimated that 100,000 drives can reduce Carbon Dioxide emissions by 600 metric tons per year.

It is still unknown if they variable speed will effect the response time of the drive. Many people are skeptical saying that it is likely that the drive will have slower response time as a result of variable speed. Western Digital hasn't said anything about response and access time on the new GreenPower hard drives. Another reason to be skeptical, prices are still unknown. Western Digital hasn't said anything about what price the new drives will sell for. Many "eco-friendly" products cost slightly more than their less efficient partners, but it is still possible that the prices are reasonably close to current prices.

Western Digital is still expected to announce more GreenPower hard drives, but it is unknown when. Western Digital is the first computer part manufacturer to release any environmentally friendly parts, but it is likely that this trend will continue and expand in the future. Hopefully in the next few weeks we will find out more about performance and cost of these drives, until then its all speculation.