The hard disk maker, Western Digital, announced plans for its GreenPower hard disk family with lower power consumption. Ranging in capacity from 320 GB to 1 TB, the hard disks lower power consumption could save up to $100,000 in energy costs for a data center with 10,000 such drives.

A quote from the article at PCW:

WD has made the drives complaints with the latest US eco-standard Energy Star 4.0. The first to launch will be the 1TB Caviar GP, used in the My Book series of external hard drives.

New features incorporated in the drives to reduce power consumption are:

  • Balancing spin speed, transfer rate and cache size (IntelliPower)
  • Unloading the heads during idle to reduce aerodynamic drag (IntelliPark)
  • Optimizing seek speed to reduce noise and vibration (IntelliSeek)

The GreenPower family includes drives for Enterprise, Home-users, and consumer electronics.

More sources:

Western Digital goes green, offers 1TB drives (Ars Technica)

Western Digital launches enviro-friendly “GreenPower” products (Pocket-lint)