Western Digital has announced that it is launching a new line of environmentally friendly hard drives.

The line will be named GreenPower and come in flavors anywhere from 320 gigabytes up to 1 terrabyte initially. 

Designed to be Energy Star 4.0 compliant, the new hard drives are projected to consume 40% less power, equaling out to approximately a savings of $10 a year per drive on your electrical bill.  The savings are even extended to say that a data center with 10,000 drives could save $100,000 annually in energy costs and reduce their CO2 emissions by 600 metric tons, the equivalent of removing 400 cars from roads for one year.

While this sounds good in a time when evidence of global warming is mounting, technical details are conspicuously missing from the provided press release.  There is no mention of what RPMs the platters spin at, what speed the data transfers at, or any of the other details your normal computer user likes to hear before making a purchasing decision, such as the all-important pricing.  You can find the information on the Western Digital site after a bit of digging.

Shipping on the desktop variety begins immediately; enterprise-class and ce-class will follow up in the third quarter of the year.

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Entry was posted on Monday, July 23rd, 2007 at 10:41 pm under Technology.

Read more entries by Sean P. Aune.
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