WD has greened up its freshly minted 2TB SATA drive by focussing on reducing power consumption.

With a 64MB cache and dual processors, WD says its WD RE4-GP hard drives have as much as a 25 per cent performance improvement over the previous generation. It says the drives reduce power consumption by up to 50 per cent over currently available competitors’ drives, and run cool as well. They are rated at 1.2 million hours MTBF (mean time before failure) in high duty cycle environments and provide, WD says, enterprise-class reliability.

WD says the power savings come from improvements in power-conserving technologies - IntelliSeek, IntelliPark, and IntelliPower, which varies the spin speed — deliver up to an average 25 percent reduction in power consumption over its previous generation of WD RE-GP drive. The drives monitor the disk access work load and automatically invoke idle mode whenever possible, to further reduce power consumption by up to an additional 40 per cent, with recovery time from idle mode being less than one second.

The WD RE4-GP 2 TB hard drive, model WD2002FYPS, needs 6.8 watts for reading and writing data, 3.7 watts in idle mode, 0.80 watts on standby and in sleep mode. It is available now from select e-tailers and distributors with an MSRP of $329. ®

Related stories

• WD speeds up 2TB rollout (10 August 2009)
• Hitachi GST joins 2TB Club (6 August 2009)
• Western Digital intros own-brand SSDs (16 June 2009)
• HDD data density to hit 2.4Tb/in² 'by 2014' (5 June 2009)
• SATA Revision 3.0 released (27 May 2009)
• Western Digital debuts 2TB power sipping drive (20 May 2009)
• Boffins dream up Sleeptalking PC standby-mode tech (27 April 2009)
• WD makes more profit than expected (24 April 2009)
• Samsung samples 500GB laptop HDD (22 April 2009)
• Seagate's Barracuda goes low-power (22 April 2009)
• Western Digital snaps up SiliconSystems (30 March 2009)
• WD releases 2TB external HDDs (26 March 2009)
• Samsung launches not-2TB drive (6 March 2009)
• Western Digital flashes home backup and media server (19 February 2009)
• Review Western Digital My Book World Edition 1TB NAS box (18 February 2009)
• Seagate sets Constellation above Barracuda (3 February 2009)
• Review Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB hard drive (27 January 2009)
• 2TB drives arrive down under (27 January 2009)
• Seagate dishes up 1TB drive, looks ahead to 2TB (6 January 2009)