WD Caviar Hard Drive

Wester Digital recently released their eco-friendly GreenPower hard drives. The new hard drives have an average power savings of 4-5 watts over the competitor hard drives which equates to reducing CO2 emissions by up to 60 kilograms per drive per year. This is equivalent to taking your car off the road for 14 days each year. Cutting the power costs of a computer can make a difference in your electricity bill and although you should not really leave your computer on all the time, at least it will make you feel better that you are using energy efficient hard drives. Thanks to Heather Skinner, the PR Manager at WD, I was able to test it out personally. The 1TB hard drive is definitely very sweet. The capacity will allow for plenty of data storage and allow you to save tons of photos, music, movies, and other files. It is the same size as my NAS(network attached storage) and is now my backup device for my backup NAS storage! I do not have detailed benchmarks because I do not test computer equipment professionally, but from my personal usage, it has been performing pretty smoothly. Read/Write speed is pretty fast since it is a SATA hard drive and the disk noise is pretty minimal. It is pretty hard to build a green computer since you have to balance power and cooling with efficiency and reliability in making sure your computer is operating optimally. Using Western Digital’s Caviar GreenPower hard drives is definitely one component that will contribute to making your computer as green as it can be.

The three features of the hard drive are:

IntelliPower™ – A fine-tuned balance of spin speed, transfer rate and cache size designed to deliver both significant power savings and solid performance. For each GreenPower drive model, WD uses a different and invariable RPM. Throughout the product line, RPM ranges between 5400 and 7200.

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.

You can read more about the hard drives at WesternDigital.com.

Add comment November 12th, 2007 Alex

Al Gore is KPCB’s newest partner

Al Gore just announced that he will be joining Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, as a partner to promote more green businesses. He will be donating 100% of his salary to the Alliance for Climate Protection, his Palo Alto-based nonprofit group that advocates stronger climate changing policies. I went to a Girls in Tech forum and one of the panelists was Trae Vassallo, of KPCB and green tech has been one of their current focuses for new investments. Now with Al Gore on board, there should be plenty of attention and traction to get the green technology moving. Silicon Valley is at the forefront for new technology companies and there are plenty of green startups with VC funding. Most of them however, are on the DL, and are focussed on research and development. In due time, however, I think we will see more news and coverage about some of those technologies. Al Gore also sits on the board of Apple Inc, is a senior adviser to Google, and is co-founder and president of Current TV, a San Francisco based cable television network.

 via SFGate

Add comment November 12th, 2007 Alex

Oil Spill

Earlier this week, a Cosco ship container spilled 58,000 gallons of oil into the water from ramming into the Bay Bridge. It has caused a lot of environmental impact by killing a ton of sealife and polluting the beaches and waterfront spots. It is also a waste of oil especially since gas is so expensive! The worst part is that Captain John Cota, the mariner who was piloting the container, has been involved in other incidents and was reprimanded last year as shown in state regulatory documents. Although, he has been guiding ships for more than 25 years, he has had four “incidents” in the past 14 years.  This reminds me of the truck explosion that happened earlier this year as the truck driver also had previous incidents prior to his turned over truck that blew up the freeway causing the overpass to be shut down for a week. I am not really sure how I feel about these cases because even though they were accidents, they have caused a lot of damage and may have been prevented if the driver or pilot was more careful and reprimanded more seriously. However, they are also doing jobs that take a lot of care and responsibility so it may not always be their complete fault for the accidents. It is always up to the media to come up with a scapegoat or reason to blame. Before the crash, the Coast Guard had supposedly warned the pilot beforehand about his course, and there were also other reasons that were blamed such as a language communication issue, and the heavy fog.

Here is a Google Maps image of the affected areas of the spill.

via SFGate

Add comment November 9th, 2007 Alex

Green Festival 2007

The Green Festival 2007 is a joint project of Global Exchange and Co-op America and is an event for people, communities, and businesses to share all elements of being green. The event takes place at the San Francisco Concourse Exhibition Center and Giftcenter Pavillion Theater November 9th-11th. There will be speakers from the Green industry and exhibitors on display so that you can learn more about the different businesses and how their products/services help the environment.

http://www.greenfestivals.org/content/view/626/281/

Add comment November 6th, 2007 Alex

Greenhouse gases from Wildfires

The wildfires in Southern California last week created the same amount of greenhouse gases equivalent to one week’s worth of the burning of fossil fuels. The University of Colorado showed that the wildfires created 7.9 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from Oct. 19 to 26. The study was based on satellite observations and a computer model. The damages from the wildfires were estimated at over $1.5 billion and destroyed 2,196 homes and 515,267 acres of land. The fires were caused by different incidents, one was caused by a 12 year old boy playing with matches, another was an arsonist, and one was caused by workers using griding tools on a construction site. In my previous post, I mentioned the cause and effect of global warming and wildfires. Wildfires cannot be contributed to global warming but it can be another good reason to fight global warming. 

via SFGate
statistics were taken from here

Add comment November 1st, 2007 Alex