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Western Digital's "Green" Hard Drives
MojoKid writes "Eco-friendly or 'green' products are becoming much more fashionable these
days, especially in things like high-end electronics, where the impact on the
environment and the disposal of these products is being regulated now by such
things as the RoHS compliance standard. In addition, power consumption is also
being looked at more closely for all the obvious reasons. Hard Drive
manufacturer Western Digital recently took the initiative by being the first
drive manufacture to produce and market
a lower power version of their Caviar line of hard drives. The
numbers here show that a green hard drive will probably only save an average
end user about 10 watts in total system power consumption. However, from a
data center perspective, where demand for storage is growing by the petabyte at
an alarming rate, 10 watts per drive can certainly add up quickly."
In fact, WD GP drives are the quietest on the market. Found this gem just the other day:
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article804-page2.html
Idle and seek noise are extremely low, and vibrations almost negligible (this is also a very important thing when you have two same drives, for example in a redundant RAID array *cough*).
The power savings aren't 10W, though.
The Green Power drives are also impressively quiet! I've been looking for drives like this for years! This is perfect for those who want to build recording studio PCs, do lots of music production work, people building multimedia PCs, or those who just plain like quiet drives. You can even use a smaller SSD drive to get blazing random access performance just for games while using the Green Power for other purposes, and get the best of both worlds. (The Gigabyte iRam is spec'd perfectly for this, but it's a bit pricey.)