Maximum PC

With rolling blackouts and increasing energy costs, it's not a bad idea to think about building a power saving PC. You can start with an energy efficient power supply boasting active PFC, add a low wattage processor, ditch that aging CRT monitor for an LCD panel, and coming soon from Western Digital, you'll be able to own an eco-friendly hard drive!

Dubbed Greenpower, Western Digital plans to unveil their new lineup starting first with a 1TB external My Book drive this month, which they claim can save up to 40% in power usage. Expect the internal version to ship in August, and by Q3, we should be seeing volume shipments of the GP labeled drives from 320GB on up.

So what makes these drives different? No, they're not partialy solar powered, but according to their press release, they do sport three new buzz words that Western Digital describes as follows:

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.

Marketing jargon aside, WD says their new Greenpower drives will run on 4-5 watts less than their competitor's offerings, while also reducing CO2 omission by up to 60kg a year. And best of all, they say not to expect a performance hit. Sounds like a win-win situation, now if only we could get GPU manufacturers to jump on the power-saving bandwagon...

Dollar amounts may not seem like much, but coupled with other power saving components, you can finally justify that pricey dinner you ate the other night.

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Western Digital, Hard Drive, storage, power saving

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