Well as it turns out, Kanguru Solutions isn’t the only company in town looking to get greener with their products. Seems like everyone is jumping on board Al Gore’s bandwagon these days (which is good of course). Case in point – Western Digital has announced that they are introducing a new environmental friendly line of desktop, enterprise, CE, and external hard drive products called the GreenPower family. The GreenPower family of drives will ship in capacities ranging from 320GB to 1TB and will save up to 40 percent in hard drive power consumption – or as WD puts it – up to $10 dollars per drive per year.

The new GreenPower drives support the latest ENERGY STAR 4.0 specifications and come with Western Digital’s latest hard drive technology. The first drive that will utilize GreenPower technology will be the WD Caviar GP drive which comes with 1 terabyte of storage space. The drive will ship this month in the “My Book” range of storage appliances with 1 TB desktop channel shipments following up in August.

The WD GreenPower platform consists of the following technologies:

• IntelliPower – a balance of spin speed, transfer rate, and cache size designed to deliver both significant power savings and solid performance
• IntellPark – lower power consumption by automatically unloading the heads during idle to reduce aerodynamic drag
• IntelliSeek – Calculates optimal seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise, and vibration

You can find out more about WD’s GreenPower family here.

As I mentioned earlier, the WD Caviar GP drive will be the first GreenPower product. The 1 terabyte drive features all the GreenPower functionality listed above as well as:

• Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) capabilities for greater aerial density
• StableTrac – The motor shaft is secured at both ends to reduce system induced vibrations and stabilize platters for accurate tracking, during read and write ops
• Rotation speed between 5400 to 7200 RPM
• 16MB buffer size
• 50,000 minimum start/stop cycles
• 4.2 ms average latency
• 8.9 ms read seek times

[Check it out via GearLog]

Technorati Tags: Western Digital, GreenPower, Caviar GP