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Western Digital Caviar GP  (Source: Western Digital)
Western Digital GreenPower reduces power consumption by up to 40%

Western Digital today announced a new line of hard drives with greater emphasis on power saving – GreenPower. Western Digital has new GreenPower drives for desktop, enterprise, consumer electronics and external applications. The new GreenPower drives claim power consumption reductions of up to 40%, resulting in $10 per drive, per year savings in actual power costs.

Western Digital also claims best-in-class operating temperatures and acoustics while yielding four-to-five watts of power savings compared to standard drivers. The power consumption reductions can translate to reduced CO2 emissions up to 49KG per drive, per year. Western Digital claims the reduced CO2 emissions is comparable to taking a car off the road for two weeks, based on average daily CO2 emissions.

New technologies endow the GreenPower hard disks to reduce power consumption. WD’s new IntelliPower technology determines the hard drive’s spin speed, transfer rate and cache to maintain power savings without sacrificing performance. IntelliPower technology varies the spin speed between 5400-to-7200RPM. IntelliPark technology reduces aerodynamic drag and lowers power consumption by unloading the heads in idle states. IntelliSeek technology reduces power consumption, noise and vibration by maintaining optimum seek speeds.

Western Digital designates all GreenPower drives with a GP suffix. GreenPower Caviar GP, RE-GP and AV-GP models will arrive in capacities of 320GB-to-1TB.

The first GreenPower drive will ship this month as an external drive. The new Western Digital My Book range will feature the new WD Caviar GP 1TB hard drive. WD Caviar GP 1TB drives for desktops won’t ship until August, while RE-GP and AV-GP models will ship within Q3’2007.

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Also worthy of mentioning
By jay0110 on 7/23/2007 6:05:16 PM , Rating: 3
The new series will feature 5400-7200 RPM speed, SATA 2 port with 16 MB buffer, average latency of 4.20 ms, and 8.9 ms seek time.

http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/Products...




RE: Also worthy of mentioning
By TomZ on 7/23/2007 6:13:41 PM , Rating: 2
The question is, do these drives dynamically change their rotational speed between 5400 and 7200RPM, or is it just that different models in this family have different (static) speeds?


RE: Also worthy of mentioning
By jay0110 on 7/23/2007 7:12:10 PM , Rating: 2
Good question, I actually think that in order to save power, these drives change the rotational speed dynamically.

I also found this demo interesting:
http://www.westerndigital.com/en/flash/index.asp?f...


RE: Also worthy of mentioning
By Gary Key on 7/23/2007 7:17:22 PM , Rating: 2
The drives will dynamically change their rotational speeds based upon load factors.


RE: Also worthy of mentioning
By yehuda on 7/24/2007 11:14:52 AM , Rating: 2
Hi Gary,

I hope you can get one for review.


RE: Also worthy of mentioning
By hubajube on 7/23/07, Rating: -1
RE: Also worthy of mentioning
By shabby on 7/23/2007 7:02:32 PM , Rating: 5
Every drive fails, i've had maxtor/wdc/seagate drives fail. Its not like any manufacturer is immune to this.


RE: Also worthy of mentioning
By ultimaone on 7/24/2007 1:17:44 AM , Rating: 2
i agree
like ibm went through some bad drives awhile ago

a friend of mine works for a company that bought a bunch of maxtor drives and about 1 in 5 has been bad

yet every maxtor i've ever owned has been fine

i've had two western digitals die on me, but i blame
that on the power bumps where i lived

had a friend loose 2 seagate drives

so ya, everyone has different experiences and they all
go through bad batchs of drives, it sucks, but...oh well


RE: Also worthy of mentioning
By Screwballl on 7/24/2007 1:00:35 PM , Rating: 2
As a PC Tech, I see drives of all types failing. Not one is immune... but through all of my experiences, the 1 that fails the least over long term is WD. I still have a 512MB WD drive that has been swapped between different computers through the years and is still being used for backup of small insignificant files... but still being used nonetheless. I myself have had the least number of problems with WD drives in the past who knows how many years. The worst in my experience has been Maxtor, Samsung and IBM drives. They work great for a year or two but a much larger percentage die within 2 years.


RE: Also worthy of mentioning
By Anh Huynh on 7/23/2007 6:41:42 PM , Rating: 3
The 16MB buffer is only on that particular Caviar model. The cache size can vary between different GreenPower models.


RE: Also worthy of mentioning
By jay0110 on 7/23/2007 7:03:38 PM , Rating: 2
You're right; the Caviar GP series is the only one so far that features the specs mentioned above.

Technical specs for Enterprise and CE classes are yet to be published on WD's website.


RE: Also worthy of mentioning
By Omega215D on 7/24/2007 12:07:00 AM , Rating: 2
One would think that using more cache would help in reducing power usage. I was hoping that these drives would come with 32+ MB of cache. In fact does this mean upcoming hybrid drives are also power efficient?


RE: Also worthy of mentioning
By Spivonious on 7/24/2007 10:30:09 AM , Rating: 2
I want to know how this is better than setting your drive to stop spinning after a period of inactivity. Not spinning = less power than 5400rpm.


RE: Also worthy of mentioning
By Missing Ghost on 7/24/2007 7:03:46 PM , Rating: 2
Spinning up from 0rpm takes a lot of power.


RE: Also worthy of mentioning
By TomZ on 7/25/2007 11:05:39 PM , Rating: 2
That's like the incandescent lights myth - the idea that there's no point turning out the lights if you're only away for a short while, since the turn-on surge might exceed the savings.

The myth is incorrect for HDDs, the same as it is with incandescent lights. The principle is the same. The break-even is probably if you have it off for less than a few seconds. Anything more than that is savings.


What about laptop drives?!
By Scrogneugneu on 7/23/2007 10:10:32 PM , Rating: 3
quote:
Western Digital has new GreenPower drives for desktop, enterprise, consumer electronics and external applications.


If anything "power saving" is coming to the hard disk industry, why the hell isn't the first affected market the one that needs it the most, which is the laptop market?




RE: What about laptop drives?!
By TomZ on 7/23/2007 10:40:27 PM , Rating: 2
I agree with you, but I think this is targeting large server installations that have huge electricity costs. It seems like a no-brainer to use the same technology in laptop drives.


RE: What about laptop drives?!
By Hare on 7/24/2007 1:10:29 AM , Rating: 3
I wouldn't be so sure. Heavy duty server disks usually use either SAS or SCSI. Caviar line is for desktops. You can check out WD's website and see that the new GP line is under the desktop category. Raptors and RE-models are better candidates for server use. This article even mentions the external my book drives that are definitely consumer devices.


RE: What about laptop drives?!
By TomZ on 7/24/2007 2:40:01 AM , Rating: 2
Good points.


RE: What about laptop drives?!
By yehuda on 7/24/2007 11:16:48 AM , Rating: 2
"Western Digital also says it is cooking up GreenPower versions of its RE enterprise drives and AV consumer electronics drives for the third quarter of this year."

That's from the Tech Report

http://www.techreport.com/onearticle.x/12923


RE: What about laptop drives?!
By ElFenix on 7/24/2007 1:02:01 PM , Rating: 2
WD doesn't have a SCSI line.

i imagine that this is coming out for consumer stuff first because it takes longer to certify for the enterprise line.


RE: What about laptop drives?!
By tygrus on 7/23/2007 11:28:36 PM , Rating: 2
2.5" and smaller (laptop) disk drives already have low power states, static slower spindle speed, quieter spin/seek noise and auto park heads. <2W spinning to <.5w no spin idle for 2.5" 5400 rpm lots of stop/start with low power use inbetween. MS was trying to keep laptop HD in sleep mode for longer which reduces benefit of IntelliSeek and IntelliPower. Still be good to see in real world use. Like CPU at lower speed while using battery and small load.


RE: What about laptop drives?!
By lumbergeek on 7/24/2007 4:14:56 PM , Rating: 2
It has come to the laptop market, in a different fashion. We call them Solid State Drives (SSD) and there are no moving parts creating waste heat from friction.


eh
By Egglick on 7/23/2007 8:19:45 PM , Rating: 2
I'd only be interested if they reduced their failure rate by 40% and increased their warranty by 40%.




RE: eh
By glitchc on 7/24/07, Rating: 0
RE: eh
By mmeytin on 7/24/2007 1:56:06 PM , Rating: 2
Seagate desktop drives come with 5 year warranty, and Maxtor (owned by Seagate now) - with 3 year warranty.

-M-


RE: eh
By TomZ on 7/24/2007 2:44:56 PM , Rating: 2
In addition to the points made by mmeytin, I would add that WDC has different warranty periods for different drives. Raptor drives, for example, have a five-year warranty.


no performance hit?
By Loser on 7/23/2007 8:22:41 PM , Rating: 4
i dont think that spinning up//down will come without performance hit
hope anand will test em out soon
and what about price?
it will save $10 but will it cost 100 more?




49 KG emmisions
By ATWindsor on 7/24/2007 2:14:45 AM , Rating: 3
For the savings to be that big, you would have to get all you electricity from the coal, wich reelases the most CO2 per electricity produced(?) at 1 kg per kwh (approx). You would have to run it 24/7, and you would have to sace 5 watts all the time you are running it.

AtW




Green Power
By budapest on 7/23/2007 11:38:22 PM , Rating: 2
I sense an IT update on the horizon for Greenpeace.




By defter on 7/24/2007 2:11:11 AM , Rating: 2
By manufacturing these drives? In terms of CO2 and other emissions?

My guess is that environmental impact from manufacturing significantly outweights operational impact during 1-2 years. Thus, from the environmental point of view, it's better to use existing hard drive a couple of years longer, instead of upgrading to a brand new "environment friendly" hard drive every 1-2 years.




By Blackraven on 7/24/2007 9:38:33 AM , Rating: 2
While this "GreenPower" stuff from WD is a welcome news (I acknowledge this as a win-win situation for ALL), it won't matter to me at all........if they don't release a GP model for the Raptor X 150GB.

I'm not interested at all in their Caviar drives......so if WD wants my money for their GP initiative, then release one of the Raptor X 150GB.

Until then, I won't even bother buying a WD drive with GP.

Two cents.




My Turn
By sirius4k on 7/24/2007 1:12:16 AM , Rating: 1
No matter what You WD haters and other whiners say... I'll take one when it comes out :D
A 1TB version of it.

Green is the way to go!

PS! I have a WD 300GB SATA1 & WD My Book Premium ES 500GB SATA2 drives and they are perfectly working... My Book is still new, but I'm positive it will serve me well :)




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