Caviar Green Hard Drive Offeres More Energy Savings for PCs
by Jaymi Heimbuch, Central Coast, California on 10. 6.08
For those of you who like building your own PCs and are always on the lookout for ways to make it greener and more energy efficient, Western Digital has an improved version of its hard drive, called Caviar Green, to help you out. The company states that the new hard drive uses 20% less energy and performs even better than the previous iteration.
It can get pretty aggravating when companies push hard that their product is eco-friendly and green just because it consumes less energy. WD is nudging close to the greenwashing line in the way they angle this product. Nevertheless, energy conservation is indeed a big part of being eco-conscious, and so we’ll have a closer look at this new hard drive.
The company points out three technologies utilized that help drop the power consumption down while the performance is boosted – IntelliSeek, which calculates the optimum seek speed, NoTouch ramp load technology, which ensures less wear on disk media, and IntelliPower, a balance of spin speek, transfer rate, and caching algorithms. Additionally, the company states that the Cavia Green consumes less current during start up, for that extra bit of savings.
All the features sound pretty cool, and energy savings is energy savings. So gadget heads, take note of a new product to consider for your greener gadget arsenal.
Via Good Clean Tech
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How could you possibly consider this greenwashing? Do you think CFLs are greenwashing, too?
Some days it seems like half the posts on Treehugger are hyping "green" conspicuous consumption. Then when a company makes a vital part of our information infrastructure more efficient this is the reaction? Western Digital should be commended for this, as even the previous version of these drives were quite a bit more efficient than the competition.
Even if WD only sells 1 million of these drives, together they will save as much energy as a one of the largest wind turbines could generate.
I'll tell you how it's greenwashing. The drive would have done that without the green label. These are normal advancements for hard drives. Bigger storage on smaller medium = faster access, plus less energy to wind the disc up to speed. Friction, vibration and balance are hard drive killers, so that is always improving as well, creating more energy efficiency. Bigger cache = not accessing the disc as often. Take a look at hard drive advancements over the years, all of these aspects are addressed. But this year, it gets a green label. BTW, Western Digital Caviar drives kick butt. I wouldn't buy anything else.
i also agree. using real engineering to reduce overall power consumption is fantastic news. this type of breakthrough is something that could later become the new standard and thus the potential future energy saving would be even better. good work WD...!
Last week I purchased two 1TB versions of this drive. They are going in a DNS-323 NAS which will be in a RAID arrangement so that my data is safe. I realized that I can keep my aged desktop this way and keep this NAS for the big data storage rather than fire up the desktop anytime I want to get a file off of it.
The NAS stays off (unplugged) except when I need it. Won't likely be obsolete anytime soon either. Uses laptop levels of power. Runs Linux. Let's the drives spindown when they aren't being used.
These green drives are quiet, cool as a cucumber, and hopefully will last a long, long time.
A pet pieve of mine is forced obsolesence. My desktop is about 6 years old with an upgraded powersupply to help it use less power. I have it spindown drives and fans as it can. I don't like having to buy something just to be compatible every two years.
Gotta agree with Splicer and UncleBen: This is the real deal, not greenwashing. The stuff hidden inside, using power and making us burn coal is a lot more important than replacing the plastic case with bamboo.