WD Ships Second-Gen Green Power Hard Drives

WD SHIPS SECOND-GENERATION GREEN HARD DRIVES WITH SIGNIFICANTLY IMPROVED POWER EFFICIENCY AND PERFORMANCE

WD’s Best Selling Eco-friendly WD Caviar Green Drive Continues to be the Most Power-Efficient, Coolest and Quietest 3.5-inch Hard Drive in the Market

LAKE FOREST, Calif. - Oct. 1, 2008 - WD (NYSE: WDC) today announced the second-generation of its highly popular and environmentally friendly WD Caviar Green desktop hard drives, which feature the company’s GreenPower technology to significantly reduce power consumption, compared with standard hard drives. The new platform is based on WD’s 333 GB/platter technology with 32 MB cache, producing capacities ranging from 500 GB to 1 TB.

As an innovative leader in green storage technology, WD has ramped up its successful GreenPower technology-based hard drives to greater than 10 percent of its 3.5-inch hard drive shipments in the initial twelve months of production, making low-power technologies one of WD’s fastest growing segments and WD Caviar Green one of the most successful new products in the company’s recent history. 

WD’s latest WD Caviar Green hard drives consume up to 20 percent less power and offer a 10 percent increase in performance over the previous version , while continuing to provide the market with hard drives enabling quieter and cooler-running desktop PCs and external storage devices. “WD’s first-to-market offering of green technology has generated positive customer experience, while lessening the burden on our natural resources,” said Don Bennett, vice president and general manager of WD’s desktop business unit. “Compared with competitive drives, customers realize a reduction in power consumption, leading to less heat generation, which enables greater long-term reliability in all applications.”

Cool, Quiet Hard Drives
The following technologies enable WD’s Caviar Green hard drives:

• IntelliPower – A fine-tuned balance of spin speed, transfer rate and caching algorithms designed to deliver both significant power savings and solid performance. Additionally, GreenPower drives consume less current during startup allowing lower peak loads on systems as they are booted.
• IntelliSeek – Calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise, and vibration.
• NoTouch ramp load technology – Designed to ensure the recording head never touches the disk media resulting in significantly less wear to the recording head and media, as well as better drive protection in transit.