WD Caviar® GP GreenPower™ Hard Drives
Environmentally responsible storage
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Environmental sustainability is important to us at Western Digital. One of the best ways we can make a positive impact on the environment is to help our customers PC, server, consumer electronics and external hard drive manufacturers - offer products that consume less electricity. To that end, WD has designed an eco-friendly GreenPower™ (GP) hard drive family for WD® desktop, enterprise, CE and external hard drive products.
Based on extensive customer input toward supporting ENERGY STAR 4.0 compliance and incorporating the latest in engineering technology we developed this platform to bring more energy efficient hard drive options to our customers. |
It's about the environment
As hard drive capacities increase, the power required to run those drives increases as well. Currently available 1 TB hard drives have a typical power consumption rating greater than 13.5 watts. WD has designed the first 3.5-inch hard drives that deliver power savings as the primary attribute.
GP drives from WD yield average drive power savings of 4-5 watts over competitors' drives while maintaining solid performance.
That power savings equates to reducing CO2 emission by up to 60 kilograms per drive per year - the equivalent of taking your car off the road for 14 days each year. This new platform makes it possible for our energy-conscious customers to build systems with higher capacities and the right balance of system performance, ensured reliability and energy conservation.
...the equivalent of taking your car off
the road for 14 days each year. |
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It's also about saving money
Consuming less power lowers the electricity bill. By how much? It depends on several factors: The system type (desktop, server, DVR, external drive); how many hours per year the drives run; other factors such as air conditioning costs and power supply efficiency; and the cost of a kilowatt hour.
Here's a chart that takes into account these factors and estimates the savings:
Segment |
Hours/Year |
Power Multiplier |
$/KWatt |
TCO$/year |
Kg of CO2 |
Days of Driving
(Based on Avg. Daily CO2 Emissions) |
Enterprise |
8760 |
2.40(1) |
$0.12(4) |
$10.09 |
60.5(5) |
14(6) |
CE |
8760 |
1.25(2)
1.54(3) |
$0.12(4) |
$5.26
$6.48 |
31.5(5)
38.9(5) |
7(6)
9(6) |
Desktop |
3120 |
1.25(2)
1.54(3) |
$0.12(4) |
$1.87
$2.31 |
11.2(5)
13.8(5) |
3(6)
3(6) |
USB/FireWire Drives |
3120 |
1.25(2)
3.33(3) |
$0.12(4) |
$1.87
$4.99 |
11.2(5)
29.9(5) |
3(6)
7(6) |
Ethernet Drives |
8760 |
1.25(2)
3.33(7) |
$0.12(4) |
$5.26
$14.00 |
31.5(5)
84.5(5) |
7(6)
19(6) |
By WD estimates our new GreenPower platform can save large data-hungry organizations like financial institutions and search engine services, up to $10 per drive per year in electricity costs (U.S.). Ten dollars per year doesn't sound like much until you consider, for example, a large data center with say 10,000 drives. Do the math, that's up to $100,000 in saving per year.
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Large organizations with many desktop
computers can minimize their carbon
footprint and save real money on
electricity costs... |
What about our GreenPower desktop drives, how can they make a difference? By using environmentally-conscious PCs with our WD Caviar GP drives on board, large organizations with many desktop computers can minimize their carbon footprint and save real money on electricity costs.
Still more savings can be achieved with high capacity external storage devices using GreenPower drives. External USB, FireWire and Ethernet drives can save up to $14 per year in electricity costs depending on the power-on-hours and power supply efficiency.
There are a lot of computer systems, network servers, and external storage devices out there consuming a lot of electricity, if we can make a difference by helping to reduce the power consumption of just a small percentage of them, we believe we will have made a positive impact on the environment.
Technology
WD’s GreenPower platform is the first 3.5-inch hard drive platform designed with power savings as the primary attribute. drives from WD deliver average drive power savings of 4-5 watts over competitors’ drives, ultra-cool, quiet operation and solid performance.
The following technologies enable our GreenPower platform:
IntelliPower™ - A fine-tuned balance of spin speed, transfer rate and cache size designed to deliver both significant power savings and solid performance. For each GreenPower drive model, WD uses a different and invariable RPM. Throughout the product line, RPM ranges between 5400 and 7200.
IntelliPark™ - Delivers lower power consumption by automatically unloading the heads during idle to reduce aerodynamic drag.
IntelliSeek™ - Calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise and vibration.
The Green Power Family
Our GreenPower technology will be available in all our 3.5-inch hard drive product families.
Today we are shipping GP drives designed for desktop computers and external storage devices. For more information about WD Caviar GP, GreenPower drives for the desktop, follow this link. These drives will ship in capacities ranging from 320 GB to 1 TB. Look for GP drives in our enterprise-class and CE-class families of drives by the third quarter of 2007.
2.5-inch drives are also designed with power savings in mind
For eco-friendly, power-saving systems that require lower capacities take a look at our low-power consuming 2.5-inch drive family - WD Scorpio. |
Capacities from
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