NEW GREEN HARD DRIVE BY WESTERN DIGITAL
by Jorge Chapa, 08/02/07
A month or two ago, we brought you news of the HP RP5700, which is being marketed as the greenest computer ever. But for those of you that just need a bit of storage or an efficient way to back-up your most valuable files, Western Digital has announced a new line of hard drives designed with energy efficiency in mind.
Even the tiniest reductions in energy consumption can make a big difference. Case in point, Western Digital announced that their line of external storage units, the Mybook, will now include the new GreenPower hard drives. While individually these units might not make much of a difference, as soon as this technology hits the enterprise market, which should be happening soon, the CO2 savings start adding up (large enterprises can use around 10,000 hard drives for their data-hungry storage needs).
According to WD, each of these drives will save about 13.8kg CO2 per year compared to similar products. For a large data center, say for instance, a bank, that saving could turn out to be around 248 tons of carbon a year. The first of these 3.5 inch hard drives, the 1TB WD Caviar GP, was available as of July first.
Samsung and Fujitsu has 32GB NAND, solid state memory drives selling in laptops for a while now (http://www.engadget.com/2006/05/23/samsungs-q30-ssd-with-32gb-flash-drive-on-sale-in-june/) … you can buy them in Dell computers. NAND drives have higher energy efficiency then disk-based drives because they don’t have to spin disks and move a read/write head (http://news.mongabay.com/2006/1013-tina_butler.html).