In these days the energy supply is becoming a growing problem, and energy consumption by computers is certainly a problem for large companies (and actually also for anyone running a PC).
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's August 2007 report to Congress on Server and Data Center Energy Efficiency, data centers consumed an estimated 1.5 percent of the Nation's energy in 2006 (equivalent to 61 billion Kilowatt-hours or $4.5 billion). Furthermore, the agency stated, if left unchecked, data center power consumption will threaten to cost the public and private sectors $7.4 billion in annual electricity costs by 2011.
Western Digital is trying to reduce power needs introducing the energy-conscious GreenPower™ family of enterprise hard drive products. The new WD RE2 GreenPower (GP) family offers capacities of 500 gigabytes (GB), 750 GB and one terabyte (TB). WD RE2 drives are reliability-rated at 1.2 million hours MTBF (mean time between failure) in high duty cycle environments.
Each WD RE2-GP hard drive consumes an average of 4-5 watts less than competitive hard drives. By WD estimates, under typical workloads, the new WD RE2-GP drives will save more than $10 per drive per year in electricity costs. Consequently, a large data center with 10,000 drives can save $100,000 in annual energy costs.
More details can be found at Western Digital.
