Western Digital's Green Hard Drive

Western Digital announced its latest enterprise hard drive today which reduces energy usage and lowers costs for data centers. The new GreenPower family of HDDs range from 500GB to 1TB storage capacity.

The drives are reliability rated at 1.2 million hours mean time between failure in high duty cycle environments. WD says these drives can reduce power usage by 40%. "Delivering up to 40 percent savings in hard drive power consumption, Western Digital's new RE2-GP hard drives are an excellent choice for customers deploying Rackable Systems' newest generation of Eco-Logical storage systems -- enabling even greater efficiency and performance," said Tony Gaughan, chief products officer of Rackable Systems.

WD says the GreenPower drives can save data centers more than $10 per drive each year in energy costs. Large data centers running 10,000 drives could see money savings of $100,000 per year thanks to the low 4-5 watts of power required for drive operation. The drives are priced from $149.99 to $349.99.