Western Digital, one of the world’s top makers of hard disk drives (HDDs), on Tuesday officially unveiled its new family of Caviar Green hard drives with reduced power consumption and up to 2TB (2000GB) capacity. The new devices are officially the world’s highest-capacity hard drives to date.

The new WD Caviar Green family of drives includes 1TB, 1.5TB and 2TB models that feature up to 7200rpm spindle speed, 32MB buffer, Serial ATA-300 interface as well as a plethora of proprietary technologies from Western Digital that boost speed, improve reliability, reduce power consumption and noise level. Maximum power consumption of the new WD Caviar Green is just 7.4W, whereas idle consumption is 3.9W. The set of technologies includes:  

• IntelliPower, which fine-tunes the balance of spin speed, transfer rate and caching algorithms designed to deliver both significant power savings and solid performance.
• IntelliSeek, which calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise, and vibration.
• NoTouch ramp load technology, which is designed to ensure the recording head never touches the disk media resulting in significantly less wear to the recording head and media, as well as better drive protection while in transit.
• StableTrac, which secures the motor shaft at both ends to reduce system-induced vibration and stabilize platters for accurate tracking during read and write operations. The feature is only enabled on the 2TB model (WD20EADS).

“Saving power without sacrificing storage capacity is what consumers want, and what many businesses are requiring today. With the launch of the new WD Caviar Green 2 TB hard drive, customers receive the additional capacities needed to operate today’s highly advanced programs and high-resolution digital files while using less power than typical drives with similar performance and capacities,” said Jim Morris, WD senior vice president and general manager of client systems.

Even though 2TB seems to be overkill for today, Western Digital hopes that the new family of its storage products will find their buyer because of the combination of high capacity, low power consumption and low noise levels.

“While some in the industry wondered if the end consumer would buy a 1 TB drive, already some 10 percent of 3.5-inch hard drive sales are at the 1 TB level or higher, serving demand from video applications and expanding consumer media libraries. The 2 TB hard drives will continue to satisfy end user’s insatiable desire to store more data on ever larger hard drives,” said Mark Geenen, president of Trend Focus.

The WD Caviar Green 2 TB is available at select resellers and distributors. Manufacturer suggested retail price for the WD Caviar Green 2 TB hard drives (model WD20EADS) is $299.

Tags: WD