Western Digital, the world's second largest hard drive vendor behind Seagate, today unveiled GreenPower, a new environmentally friendly line of hard drives that focus on energy efficiency.
The new GreenPower family will save up to 40 percent in power consumption, which could translate to a $10 savings per drive each year. The GreenPower drives will come in capacities ranging from 320GB to one terabyte, with Western Digital's 1TB Caviar GP hard drive being the first to debut the new technology this month.
Claiming a strategic shift of focus, the company decided not to disclose any speed or cache specifications because, according to the company, "spin speed and disk cache [are] no longer the key-overriding factors in the storage industry".
"We may vary the RPM [revolutions per minute], depending on the best power usage of the product. We don't want to disclose and paint ourselves into a box. There's a balance that we have to do in order to continue to be best in class."
Western Digital is not the only hard drive manufacturer rolling out a line of power-saving hard drives. Last week, Kanguru Solutions also announced the release of the Kanguru Eco Drive, an environmentally friendly and energy efficient external hard drive that claims to reduce power consumption by up to 75%.