Western Digital on Monday revealed a new lineup of its hard disk drives (HDDs) that feature reduced power consumption, which lowers their cost of ownership and preserves energy, thus helping to protect the environment.

“With the GreenPower family, WD is improving the environment while reducing cost of ownership. Our focus on energy efficiency benefits commercial customers and consumers alike,” said John Coyne, WD president and chief executive officer.

WD said it had delivered the first 3.5” hard drive platform designed with power savings as the primary attribute. The initial drive that will take advantage of WD’s new GreenPower technology is the WD Caviar GP.

The WD Caviar GP 1TB hard drive will first ship in July in the My Book range of storage appliances, with 1TB desktop channel shipments following in August 2007. GreenPower versions of WD RAID Edition (RE) enterprise drives and WD AV consumer electronics drives will ship in volume within calendar Q3.

The WD’s GP platform is a combination of three technologies:

• IntelliPower: a fine-tuned balance of spin speed, transfer rate and cache size designed to deliver both significant power savings and solid performance.
• IntelliPark: delivers lower power consumption by automatically unloading the heads during idle to reduce aerodynamic drag.
• IntelliSeek: Calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise and vibration.

Other 1TB hard drives have a typical power consumption of 13.5W. Replacing these drives with WD GreenPower hard drives can cut that rating by over 5W, significantly reducing heat, power consumption and cost. By WD estimates, in certain applications, the new GreenPower platform can save greater than $10 per drive per year in electricity costs. For example, a data center with 10000 drives can save $100000 in annual energy costs, and reduce CO2 emission by 600 metric tons - the equivalent of taking almost 400 cars off the road for a year.

WD’s GreenPower platform is compliant with Energy Star 4.0 standards. Energy Star 4.0 computing systems are designed to enable organizations to minimize their carbon footprint as well as realize significant savings in electricity costs.