Posted 10/03/08 at 04:05:59 PM by Paul Lilly

Western Digital's making a plea to those who are concerned about the environment yet still need oodles of hard drive space. The company's new 1TB Caviar Green drive delivers on both fronts. WD stuffs three 333GB platters in its new drive along with a beefy 32MB of cache, the most currently available on any consumer desktop drive. The company says the platter density and large cache help reduce the power draw by up to 20 percent while increasing performance by 10 percent.

But it's the performance that will have power users feeling the wrong kind of green. The new Caviar checks in with a poky 5400RPM spindle speed, trading off raw performance for noise management and power savings. Price becomes another trade off with WD setting the MSRP to $219, a good chunk higher than what many other 1TB drives are commanding on Newegg. Whether or not the new Green Caviar falls more in line with the competition on the street remains to be seen.

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Hard Drive, Western Digital, HDD, hardware, 1tb, build a pc, green

Posted 10/01/08 at 10:49:02 AM by Paul Lilly

Dell last week said it planned to make a major push in outfitting all of its notebooks with LED backlighting by the end of 2011, which not only represents a step towards being green, but will have customers saving green to the tune of $20 million based on a 220 million kilowatt-hour reduction. That's good news for all involved, and it gets even better if other OEMs jump on board, and it appears they are.

Citing "market watchers," DigiTimes reports that LED backlighting will make headway anywhere from 30 to 40 percent of the notebook market in 2009. Overall penetration for 2008 has been much less at 10 percent, but Dell and other big name notebook vendors have put an increased emphasis on LED-backlight models resulting in a strong 15 percent penetration in the fourth quarter. Momentum is expected to carry over to next year and beyond.

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mobile, notebook, laptop, led, green

Posted 09/30/08 at 05:20:08 PM by Paul Lilly

Whatever you do, don't blame the bad economy on Intel. Engineers working for the chip maker claim today's processors have netted a savings of 20 Terawatt hours over that of earlier generations if used in the same time period. In monetary terms, that equates to saving the world economy $2 billion in energy costs since the Core architecture's launch two years ago. Of course, the inefficient and hot-running Prescotts of yesteryear didn't exactly set the bar very high for green improvements, but $2 billion (if correct) is impressive no matter how you slice it.

"This is no small figure - it’s a significant amount of energy savings, and an example of what technology innovation by the ICT industry can do to improve energy efficiency on a large scale," writes Lorie Wiggle, GM of Intel's Eco-Technology Program.

Meanwhile, while Intel's Atom series doesn't have nearly the global energy impact as its desktop and business CPUs do, it's interesting to note that the recently released dual-core Atom 330 processor doubles up its power consumption over the Atom 230 processor.

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intel, cpu, processor, build a pc, green, enery

Posted 09/20/08 at 04:11:40 PM by Justin Kerr

Google is home to many of the world’s smartest and most creative engineers and its newest plan once again proves they aren’t afraid to pioneer. To sum up Google’s idea in a few words, they plan to take the collective knowledge of mankind and send it out to sea, literally. The search giant is home to countless computer systems which crunch the millions of search terms thrown at it each minute and finding ways to keep costs down is always a challenge. Google hopes that by housing these computers on massive ships out in the ocean it will allow them to use sea water to both cool and power the electronics. Google’s commitment to the environment is commendable and even though data centers currently only represent a small portion of our total power consumption, the Mckinsey consulting firm predicts that by 2020 the carbon footprint of server farms will overtake the entire airline industry. In addition to energy savings, Google also stands to benefit from the tax exempt status that comes from operating in international waters. The high cost of operating data centers has pushed other companies to look for creative ways to save money as well. In fact, both Microsoft and Sun Microsystems are rumored to be looking at similarly bizarre options, though none have yet been confirmed.

Let me just say this; if Google plans to take the cloud and cast it out to sea, I hope my Google Doc’s can survive a hurricane.

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Software, Internet, Google, search, browser, data center, green

Posted 08/14/08 at 12:14:18 PM by Paul Lilly

Technological trends may come and go, but every once in awhile they turn out to be more than just temporary fads. Consider that many of today's gamers weren't even born yet in the Atari 2600's heyday, yet 30 years later gaming consoles have become so popular that there exists an entire generation of FPS junkies who actually prefer lining up a headshot with a gamepad instead of using a keyboard and mouse. And speaking of videogames, let's not forget the 3D revolution sparked by the now defunct 3DFX (moment of silence).

More than just fun and games, recognizing lasting fads can prove lucrative for companies and upstarts who ride the hype, but it's not always easy predicting where PCs are headed. If we were to look back 10 years from now, what would we say were most influential technologies of the time? No need to hop into your time machine, because with the help of Gartner Inc., an information technology research and advisory company, we answer that question right now.

Hit the jump to see which of today's technologies are at the pinnacle of their hype cycle.

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Software, technology, hype, hardware, Social Networking, IT, Microblogging, cloud computing, gartner, green, videoconference

Posted 07/28/08 at 12:01:00 AM by David Murphy

We almost didn't believe our eyes, but Fabrik is launching a completely eco-friendly external drive.  And by completely, we mean completely. The outer shell of the 500GB Simpletech "Redrive" is constructed of 100-percent recycled aluminum and bamboo.  And even the drive's packaging seems to have been designed by a Planeteer: the box itself is made up of 100-percent recyclable material, and there are no extra plastic bags, twist ties, or printed marketing materials of any kind.

Click the "Read More" link to check out all the other products Fabrik showed us!

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storage, Hard Drive, hardware, build a pc, fabrik, redrive, green, cayenne, ice