Western Digital announces new GreenPower hard drives

Kanguru may have beaten them to the punch, but we suspect Western Digital will attract a fair bit more attention with its own move into greener hard drives, with the company today announcing its new GreenPower initiative. According to the company, the new family of drives will encompass desktop, enterprise, CE and external hard
drives, and will include drives ranging in size from 320GB to 1TB. Those will apparently each boast up to a 40% savings in power consumption, which could translate to a $10 savings per drive each year on your power bill. A GreenPower version of Western Digital's 1TB Caviar GP hard drive will be the first out the gate, shipping first in the form of a WD My Book external drive later this month, with a standard desktop version set to follow in August. Other GreenPower drives will then apparently start shipping in volume within the third quarter of this year.

[Kevin @ Jul 23rd 2007 1:56PM]

Ok I can see the savings if you are able to use a lower wattage power supply.

But if I have a 200 Watt power supply on my desktop don't I use 200 watts of AC electricity all the time even if I only have 60 watts of DC devices sucking power on the other side? So does this really change anything for the normal user?

I might be wrong in my analysis of power supplies, if I am let me know.

[eqsf @ Jul 23rd 2007 2:08PM]

yes, that's incorrect.
a 200-watt power supply is capable of sourcing 200 watts total into all the electronics it drives (including the couple of watts it uses to drive its own circuitry), it does not mean it consumes 200 watts all the time.

this is easily seen if you connect a power supply and turn it on with no computer ... if it consumed 200 watts just sitting there doing nothing, it would have to ultimately generate 200 watts of heat, which you could probably fry potatoes with, but it doesn't get that hot :)

[NHAnimator @ Jul 23rd 2007 2:58PM]

Baked or french fries?

[js @ Jul 23rd 2007 1:59PM]

Death to spinning platters.

I'll take an SSD anyday than this POS.

[eqsf @ Jul 23rd 2007 2:10PM]

unfortunately SSD's are not at all a cheap solution for large amounts of data, so they won't make it to the corporate market for a long time. RAID gets you cheaper reliability than SSD anyway.

[Revrant2394 @ Jul 23rd 2007 3:51PM]

I DO hope you don't mean Flash SSD, those are crap, they boast little improvement over HDDs, we need to be focusing on MRAM and it's alternatives, they boast the increases in durability, life, and bandwidth we need.

As for this, after looking up GreenPower, that's nice and all, but I don't really care.

[Timothy Sottek @ Jul 23rd 2007 2:19PM]

But will it blend?

[Mischa Lockton @ Jul 23rd 2007 2:33PM]

I love these estimates of how much a hybrid or other technology of conservation are based on prices which we all know are heading up not down.

[james.fogal @ Jul 23rd 2007 4:44PM]

Mischa, Drive technology costs per Gigabyte of storage have actually been on a constant downward trend as far a pricing. Granted there will be some price changes as hybrid drives incorporate larger amounts of flash memory but the cost of flash memory per megabyte is also much lower than its ever been. I see new technologies only helping reliability and reducing costs in areas such as overall power consumption to the computer. Overall this trend will mean computers and drives that are much more reliable and the cost per Gigabyte of storage will be reduced. Thank God for technolgical improvements that reduce costs and do not add to them.

[Chuckles McGee @ Jul 23rd 2007 7:16PM]

Technology is probably one of the few areas where prices haven't matched inflation. Despite significant improvements in processor performance, improved battery life and capacity in devices, we pay much less or about the same for pretty much any device as compared to 5 or 10 years ago in terms of absolute dollar value- even less when you adjust for inflation. A modern device (a current iPod, lets say) has many times the capacity and battery life of it's predessor, yet costs less than the original iPod when it was introduced. That's progress.

[Mischa Lockton @ Jul 25th 2007 3:43AM]

I meant energy prices, not component prices. Surely you agree those are going up. I was referring to the claim of saving $10 a year, but from year to year my electricity bill is getting fatter at an alarming pace.

However, it would be interesting to see what inflation of electronics would happen if China followed proper free market trade practices. No more motherboards for $69.

[Brian @ Jul 23rd 2007 4:18PM]

Please don't quote "cost savings" when talking about power savings. The %40 savings, as quoted, makes it look pretty good, but then you take it down to cost, and the savings is paltry enough that most people won't care.

The price of energy is ridiculously low, and it does not include the true cost. All we need to care about is how much energy is being saved, not the price of it.

[dave-o @ Jul 23rd 2007 4:33PM]

Many companies are cashing in on the idiotic save-the-earth, green movement. We have our own ignorant selves to thank for buying into this horse manure. Look in the business section of a bookstore and take a look at how many books there are regarding cashing in on the Green movement.

[jb @ Aug 15th 2007 1:24PM]

I fail to see anything that resembles a valid point in your argument. So people are finding ways to pollute less and people are cashing in on both that and documenting how to do it. People being more environment-friendly is not a bad thing... I don't know if you got the memo on this one, but we (and I'm pretty sure a few other species) kind of live in that environment and currently have no where else to go if we trash it to completion. Keeping it in top shape should be one of our top priorities.

[stefan @ Jul 23rd 2007 5:41PM]

For typical computer users the savings will more likely be around 3-4$ per Year.
This drives would, however, reduce the need for special cooling and ultimately lead to a decreased rate of failure as drives don't like running hot.

[Maxime Rousseau @ Jul 23rd 2007 8:56PM]

I`m buying this idea, being a partisan of the "every small improvement counts" ideology, but the real question is how much will those cost more than standard drives. I am not putting an extra 50 bucks into something like this.

[myles @ Jul 23rd 2007 9:09PM]

WD hard drives, the My Book versions, already have a "standby" mode whereby the disk stops spinning after several minutes of non-use to conserve power and lengthen the life of the life of the hard drive. i wonder what more they did to save power.