One of the features that Western Digital will highlight in their product promotion is that their Caviar GreenPower hard drives are now energy efficient:

“The company began exploring ways to reduce power consumption in mobile and particularly desktop drives. The result of its program: Dropping power consumption by up to 38 percent with the new GreenPower drives. Western Digital has been able to go from 13 watts during operation–on its own drives as well as competitors’ drives–to just 8 watts.”

link: What Will You Sacrifice to Get a “Green” Hard Drive?

One of the adjustments will be in the rotational speed of the drive. A Director of Marketing for Western Digital states that “depending upon the capacity, our benchmarking, and our mathematical modeling, we are going to spin these drives at a speed between 5400 and 7200 rpm”. Apparently the noise level is decreased by five decibels. And the temperature is lowered too. The decrease in temperature was not stated, so it is not known whether this is a statistically significant reduction.

What would be nice would be that Western Digital stood behind these new improvement and announced upgrade their product warranty. Indeed, if this improves the product, offering a better warranty policy to the consumer should not be an issue.

Catherine Forsythe

[tags]western digital, hard drives, energy efficient, rotational speed, noise level, temperature, warranty[/tags]