WD Caviar Hard Drive

November 12th, 2007 Alex

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.

Entry Filed under: Green Tech,Tech Industry