Find the perfect gift for everyoneWestern Digital goes greener with new enterprise hard drive
Western Digital has been using its GreenPower technology in most of its consumer-grade hard drives, including those in the My Book World Edition NAS server and the My Book Mirror Edition external hard drive.
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Western Digital)
The company turned its hard drives' green levels up a notch on Monday with the new WD RE4-GP hard drive. The drive is designed to work best for data center and digital video production facilities.
According to Western Digital, these are the two applications where a big number of hard drives are used and therefore would show a significant improvement in energy savings.
The WD RE4-GP uses Western Digital's next generation of GreenPower technology with IntelliPower, which regulates the spinning speed of the platters and caching algorithms based on usage. This makes it the first hard drive that doesn't have rpm specifications.
The drive also supports IntelliSeek and IntelliPark, which allows for reducing the seek time and intelligently parks the drive head to further reduce power consumption and improve the drive's resistance to shock and vibration.
Unlike other enterprise hard drives that employ the SAS interface, the new WD RE4-GP supports the popular SATA interface, which is used in most consumer hard drives. This means you can also use it in your desktop at home. It comes with a whopping 64MB of cache memory (as opposed to 16MB or less found in most consumer hard drives) and provides 2TB of storage capacity. This is the largest capacity (for now) among enterprise-class hard drives.
According to Western Digital, the WD RE4-GP is also designed with technologies to make it work especially well with RAID configurations and better withstand environments that are prone to constant vibration than other hard drives. The WD RE4-GP's reliability is rated at 1.2 million hours mean time before failure in high-duty cycle environments.
The 2TB WD RE4-GP is available now with the suggested price tag of $329.
Dong Ngo is a CNET editor who covers networking and network storage, and writes about anything else he finds interesting. You can also listen to his podcast at insidecnetlabs.cnet.com. E-mail Dong.
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