Western Digital (WD) has jumped on the eco bandwagon and parted the leaves to reveal a series of 2.5in "green" hard drives, designed to help users reduce the size of their data storage carbon footprints.

The Green Power range is based on three power saving technologies: IntelliPower, which balances spin speed, transfer rate and cache size to reduce power; IntelliPark, which cuts down on power use by automatically unloading drive heads when idle; and IntelliSeek, which calculates the optimum seek speed to minimise power use, noise and vibration.

WD claimed that a standard 1TB drive, for example, consumes 13.5W of power, but that its own Green Power version will consume over 5W less.

The WD range will cover internal hard drives for the desktop and external units aimed at consumers and will eventually offer between 320GB and 1TB of storage capacity. However, WD has initially only released the 1TB WD Caviar GP hard drive, which will debute under its My Book brand.

All drives in the range comply with the Energy Star 4.0 standard, which WD claimed will enable users of the new drives to save over $10 per drive per year in electricity costs, though specific settings apply of course.

Further Green Power drives will go on sale later this quarter. Prices have yet to be set.