Western Digital has taken the green track by expanding its line of hard drives known as the GreenPower drive series, boasting power-efficient, consumer-oriented hard drives. These hard drives will come with extra features as well as new capacities, where the RE2-GP will boast 500GB, 750GB, and 1TB sizes. According to Western Digital, these new enterprise hard drives are extremely efficient, touting claims that the RE2-GP is up to 40% more efficient than competitors (in its class, obviously), while drawing 4-5W less power during an operation. There are a trio of optimization routes that the company uses - IntelliPower, IntelliPark, and IntelliSeek, delivering increased efficiency without compromising on performance.

IntelliPower focuses on the drive’s transfer rate, caching algorithms, and spin speed. Strangely enough, Western Digital isn’t big on listing the RPM of any GreenPower drive, but instead states that the rate (assumed to be between 5400-7200 RPM) is constant for all drives in a series. In a nutshell, this probably means all 500GB drives will spin at the same speed, and likewise for all 1TB drives, although both 500GB and 1TB models do not necessarily spin at the same speed.

IntelliPark is pretty self explanatory - is is WD’s very own head-parking technology that helps reduce aerodynamic drag while in idle mode by moving the drive heads elsewhere, whereas IntelliSeek was designed to calculate optimum seek speeds to reduce power consumption. In comparison, a traditional hard drive will move the drive heads as quickly as possible when retrieving data, while an IntelliSeek drive moves the heads only as fast as necessary to avoid a processing delay. As for the power savings of 4-5W, that might not sound that much on its own, but when you consider how a system could hold up to 4 hard drives, this number will balloon in a data center environment. WD estimates that a company will be able to save up to $10 a year with each RE2-GP drive, so having 1,000 of these drives hanging around could save the company up to $10,000 - enough for a nice company dinner.

Source: ArsTechnica