Eco-Friendly Hard Drives Available Soon

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Many would agree that hard-drives require a lot of power to run. One terabyte hard-drive nowadays has a typical power consumption of approximately 13.5 Watts.

The newly designed eco-friendly hard-drives, however, only use 4-5 Watts while maintaining excellent performance.

According to Western Digital, these hard-drives are internal and come in capacities from 320GB (gigabytes) to 1TB (terabyte). It supposedly delivers a saving of up to 40% in hard drive power consumption and it is geared towards accomplishing this through several technologies: balancing spin speed, transfer rate and cache size. Moreover, the drives reduce carbon emissions up to 49KG per drive, per year. Based on average daily carbon emissions, Western Digital claims that the reduced carbon emissions can be compared to not driving a car for up to two weeks. Its IntelliPower technology varies the spin speed between 5400 to 7200RPM.

Furthermore, Nino Marchetti from EcoGeek states that the drives automatically unload the heads during idle which reduced the aerodynamic drag and it also calculates optimum seek speeds.

The hard-drives are geared towards being ENERGY STAR 4.0 complaint, which basically means that they follow a trend toward minimizing carbon footprint while at the same time reducing power costs.

How much does it save money-wise? This depends on several factors such as the system type (desktop, server DVR), how many hours per year hard-drives run on, air conditioning costs and also the cost of a kilowatt per hour.

To give a number, Western Digital states that approximately $10 US per driver per year would be saved by using the eco-friendly drive. Acknowledging that this might not seem as much, Western Digital gives an example of a company using 10,000 hard-drives. If this was the case, that company would save up to $100,000 US per year.

This first of these eco-friendly 1TB drives are shipping this month for the consumer My Book line of storage products. Shortly after this will follow drives for desktop computers, enterprise operations and consumer electronic devices.