Western Digital launches eco-friendly drives

We're not sure how much of a selling point will that be, but you cannot forget that Energy Star 4.0 regs have come into place and IT has to keep up with some new, stricter guidelines. Western Digital is the first hard drive manufacturer to launch environmental-friendly drives named GreenPower. This series targets all segments.

Company claims that the new line of products consumes 60 per cent of energy compared to last generation, or that the savings will amount to $10 a year when compared to older Caviars and so on. Of course, in the US. The rest of the world might save even a bit more, given the current prices of electricity in Blighty, Germany or Croatia.

For enterprise class, WDC used a case of new data centre with 10.000 GreenPower drives saving up 100.000 dollars in annual energy cost and reduce CO2 emission by 600 metric tons. We can only hope that this environmental awareness does not come at a price of yucky performance.

In order to achieve all of the promises given, WD put several technologies into the new drive, all intelligently named Intellisomething: IntelliPower (hard drive power consumption optimisation), IntelliPark (auto-unload of the heads), IntelliSeek (electronics to lower seek time).