Western Digital and its Caviar GreenPower Hard Disk Drives
The new GreenPower drives from Western Digital are dropping power consumption by up to 38 percent. This power savings equates to reducing CO2 emission by up to 13.8 kilograms per drive per year - the equivalent of taking a car off the road for 3 days each year. For large organizations with hundreds of employees, this translates to big bucks in energy cost savings. This is yet another example of a product which can not only save the environment but save your pocketbook as well.
“It’s always been more about speed, never about doing what we’ve been doing with less power,” admits Deffenbaugh , director of product marketing for desktop drives at Western Digital.
To lower power in the overall drive, Western Digital started to tune back on some parameters. Those parameters include adjusting the rotational speed, using bigger data buffers, parking the drive’s head, and optimizing how the drive seeks and caches data.
The company has addressed this power rduction technology in five ways:
1. IntelliPower™ - A fine-tuned balance of spin speed, transfer rate and cache size designed to deliver both significant power savings and solid performance.
2. IntelliSeek™ - Calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise and vibration.
3. IntelliPark™ - Delivers lower power consumption by automatically unloading the heads during idle to reduce aerodynamic drag.
4. Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) - Employ PMR technology to achieve even greater areal density.
5. StableTrac™ - The motor shaft is secured at both ends to reduce system-induced vibration and stabilize platters for accurate tracking, during read and write operations. (750 GB and 1 TB only) 
All of these changes have led to other benefits, too: The new Caviar GP drives are less noisy than previous models, shaving 5 decibels from the noise level. And operating temperature has been lowered as well.
The first Caviar GP drives will show up inside Western Digital’s own external drives. Announced today, the 2TB My Book dual-drive models–My Book World Edition II, My Book Pro Edition II, My Book Premium Edition II–will feature the 1TB Caviar GP inside. Internal Caviar GP drives will ship in the second or third week of August.
Pricing will be in line with what you expect from a standard drive. Says Deffenbaugh, “The strategy on the Caviar GP is to use the line for [growing] market share, not for enhanced profitability.”
Taken from: PCWorld
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