WD gloats about second-generation Caviar Green Drive

Western Digital didn't have too many comrades on the green bandwagon back in July of last year, but now it's just one amongst legions. Nevertheless, it's keeping its eco-friendly membership badge up to date with the second-generation Caviar Green Drive. Said HDD features the firm's own GreenPower technology to "significantly reduce power consumption" compared to those traditional energy-sucking alternatives. The freshened platform is based on WD's 333 GB/platter technology with 32MB cache, with sizes ranging from 500GB to 1TB. According to the company, this one consumes up to 20-percent less power and offers a 10-percent uptick in performance over the previous Green Drive, and best of all, the 1TB edition (WD10EADS) can be ordered up right now for $219 (MSRP).

[Towncivilian @ Oct 4th 2008 12:17PM]

33GB per platter? Quite a typo, there.

[noyp @ Oct 4th 2008 1:22PM]

gawd, that would be a thick hard drive.

[schmitty338 @ Oct 4th 2008 2:07PM]

...that's what she said....har har...

[Warll @ Oct 4th 2008 12:17PM]

Are you so sure they're really using "33 GB/platter technology"? Because, well that would mean that they have 31 platers alone in the 1TB.

[NineT9mustang @ Oct 4th 2008 12:22PM]

Anyone else glance at these HDD News Stories in hopes that its about internal 1.5TB/2.0TB HDD's coming


But then realize a second after its not :( Come on we need bigger drives! its been way too long!

[Kizorblade @ Oct 4th 2008 12:39PM]

I think there are already 1.5TB drives out... although I may be mistaken =\

[cesium @ Oct 4th 2008 1:05PM]

Yep, seagate has 1.5TB drives out

[vaca232 @ Oct 4th 2008 12:27PM]

"WD's 33 GB/platter technology" - I think you mean 330 GB/platter

[noyp @ Oct 4th 2008 1:48PM]

Apparently, he meant 333gb

[futurepastnow @ Oct 4th 2008 12:46PM]

That's a significant price increase over the old ones, which go for about $140 now. Hopefully $219 is just the MSRP and retailers will ignore it.

[richard @ Oct 4th 2008 1:02PM]

33GB/platter I don't think i'd want a drive with 15 platters!!! :P

[Towncivilian @ Oct 4th 2008 1:05PM]

Not only that, but 1.5TB Seagate drives can be found for ~$190 usually. Not worth it to get a $220 1TB drive.

[To: Hell @ Oct 4th 2008 1:33PM]

Waiter, there's a hair in my Cavier Green Drive.

[Jash Sayani @ Oct 4th 2008 1:44PM]

Wow! Quite economical !!

[Charles @ Oct 4th 2008 2:00PM]

In computing “Green” has come to mean crap. If you want to sell a low spec PC for a 50% price premium you simply market it as “Green”. It is of course true that such a “Green” PC will use less power but that’s just because it has fewer cores/transistors/components and operates at a lower frequency.

These “Green” hard disks are also crap and the first generation was considerably slower than the regular versions. Even if they’ve improved the performance for the second generation they’re selling them at a large premium over the price of the non-Green versions. I’m all for saving power (and thus money) but at these prices you’d have to keep the drive for a long time just to break even.

[Neil Bradley @ Oct 4th 2008 2:14PM]

Wow... a whole 20% less power. So instead of ~10 watts, it's ~8 watts. At 9 cents per kilowatt hour, that would take 500 hours to save 9 cents. Or in other words, 9 cents every 20.83 days. Or a $1.57 per year "savings". Doesn't mean much when we're paying $2K-$3K/year in power.

[maveric101 @ Oct 4th 2008 4:54PM]

maybe they can make laptop drives with this tech?

[Matt @ Oct 4th 2008 5:17PM]

I'd say this is definitely a case of greenwashing.

[Towncivilian @ Oct 5th 2008 1:05PM]

It's better than nothing.

[linuxamp @ Oct 6th 2008 1:02AM]

First of all, it's 20% less than their previous green power drives which were already supposedly energy efficient. I'm not sure how much they differ from other drives but it must be more than 20%. Also, if you have a datacenter with tens of thousands of drives then it would make a much larger bulge in your wallet.

Secondly, why does it have to be about money? Isn't it enough that these drives consume less power? Since most of the worlds power comes from dirty fuel any reduction in energy helps to clean our planet.

[Al Gore @ Oct 4th 2008 2:20PM]

Yay healthy environment. I'm going to have a bon fire in their honor. I'll burn all my old seagate hard drives and their packaging.

[DanCar @ Oct 4th 2008 2:27PM]

>best of all can be ordered up right now for $219.
Sounds like WD is paying this website for saying ridiculous things. 1TB drives sell for $140.

[TheFace @ Oct 4th 2008 2:52PM]

The most interesting part about them touting their Caviar Green HDDs? The 300GB Velociraptor, an enthusiast drive, uses less power since it's a 2.5" form factor HDD.

[Synthaxx @ Oct 4th 2008 5:51PM]

Actually, the Raptor has a heatsink the size of a small japanese car.

You think that kind of heating comes free of charge, or maybe that's where a lot of it's power goes?

[d889 @ Oct 4th 2008 2:52PM]

1TB+ raptor drives plz :)

[elbow @ Oct 4th 2008 4:56PM]

Does anyone have good/bad things to say re Caviar reliability? I had thought conventional wisdom was that WD drives generally fail prematurely, just wondering if the Caviar line was an exception to this...

[nicholaelaw @ Oct 4th 2008 5:23PM]

It's true. Don't but WD drives other than the Raptors/VelociRaptors. I have two WD 500GB Mybook external drives, both of which have failed just after the 1-year warranty expired.

All those porn...

[web2.oh @ Oct 4th 2008 6:24PM]

All anecdotal hard drive reliability stories are worthless. Every Western Digital drive I've owned, including my 10 year old 15GB drive, has never failed me. Meanwhile, the one Seagate drive I bought failed within a few months of purchasing it. Someone else probably has the opposite story; every Seagate drive of theirs lasting forever, but their only WD drive shitting the bed immediately. Yet another person may rave about Samsung while decrying both Seagate and WD.

Forget the stories. When shopping for hard drives, look at the features, speed, and warranty.

[nicholaelaw @ Oct 4th 2008 5:18PM]

"Caviar Green"? What kind of color is that?

[linuxamp @ Oct 6th 2008 1:33AM]

Buy caviar, open it, leave it in a warm damp place for a year. That's caviar green.

[polobunny @ Oct 4th 2008 8:11PM]

I love to see anecdotes about drive failing, when most of the people commenting never saw more than 20 hard drives in their life... Nice bias, there. Can't do stats with such a small sample.
Continuing on that path, I've installed hundreds of hard drives, both WesternDigital and Seagate (Maxtor too, when they were around as Maxtor) and haven't noticed any extremely high percentage of failures from both companies.
I'm not surprised Maxtor was bought by Seagate to do their crappy lines, Maxtor really got a bad name with their DiamondMax 8 line-up and since then it has been problematic for them to keep with the others, even though they had quite a few OEM's in their pocket.


Note to those interested: Caviar Green do not perform well. Why? 5400rpm instead of 7200rpm. Power saving comes from there, not from their magical new energy saving technology.

[polobunny @ Oct 4th 2008 8:12PM]

I love to see anecdotes about drive failing, when most of the people commenting never saw more than 20 hard drives in their life... Nice bias, there. Can't do stats with such a small sample.
Continuing on that path, I've installed hundreds of hard drives, both WesternDigital and Seagate (Maxtor too, when they were around as Maxtor) and haven't noticed any extremely high percentage of failures from both companies.
I'm not surprised Maxtor was bought by Seagate to do their crappy lines, Maxtor really got a bad name with their DiamondMax 8 line-up and since then it has been problematic for them to keep with the others, even though they had quite a few OEM's in their pocket.


Note to those interested: Caviar Green do not perform well. Why? 5400rpm instead of 7200rpm. Power saving comes from there, not from their magical new energy saving technology.

[scootinger @ Oct 4th 2008 8:23PM]

I wonder if WD is going to be misleading about the speeds of these drives too? It is IMPOSSIBLE to find an accurate speed spec for the first-gen GreenPower drives...with WD reporting the drive's rotational speed as "GreenPower", Newegg reporting the speed as "5400 to 7200 RPM"...way to be honest WD!

[Monkeyland @ Oct 5th 2008 3:13PM]

Who cares about green hdd`s???? For gods sake, give us 1.5tb disks like seagate did.

Bigger is better........