Energy-Saving Hard Drives

Western Digital GreenPower Family

Western Digital released so-called GreenPower hard drives for three different market segments, to address enterprise applications, desktop users and consumer electronics. The drives are available at 500, 750 and 1000 GB capacity points, and they carry the common product names such as Caviar, RE2 (RAID Edition 2) or AV (Audio/Video), but with the GP suffix. We took a look at two of the Caviar GP drives, which are designed for regular PC use.

We don’t really appreciate the obvious lack of information on the product page for GreenPower. WD talks a lot about environmental issues, but it failed to provide information on spindle speed even in the data sheet. Yes, there is 16 MB of cache memory and a 300 MB/s SATA interface, but the mandatory technical specs are missing.

Let’s look at the two drives we received.

WD5000AACS aka Caviar GP Green Power