Western Digital Enterprise Greenpower Hard Drives Reduce Energy Consumption, Significantly LOWERING COSTS for Data Centers

Western Digital Enterprise Greenpower Hard Drives Reduce Energy Consumption, Significantly LOWERING COSTS for Data Centers

Western Digital RE2-GP Drives Deliver the Lowest Power Consumption and Solid Performance for Enterprise Customers
Western Digital Corp. (NYSE: WDC) today announced its new environmentally friendly, energy-conscious GreenPower™ family of WD® enterprise hard drive products. The new Western Digital RE2 GreenPower (GP) family offers capacities of 500 gigabytes (GB), 750 GB and one terabyte (TB), and provides data-hungry organizations with a money-saving solution to combat the challenges faced in the enterprise IT sector, such as, total available drive slots, maximum capacity, and available power and budget. Addressing a growing high-capacity enterprise market, Western Digital RE2 drives are reliability-rated at 1.2 million hours MTBF (mean time between failure) in high duty cycle environments.

"Delivering up to 40 percent savings in hard drive power consumption, Western Digital's new RE2-GP hard drives are an excellent choice for customers deploying Rackable Systems' newest generation of Eco-Logical storage systems -- enabling even greater efficiency and performance," said Tony Gaughan, chief products officer of Rackable Systems.

Western Digital RE2-GP hard drives are designed with power savings as the primary attribute. The Western Digital RE2-GP hard drives offer massive capacity with significant power savings and lower total cost of ownership compared to other competitive enterprise-class drives.

"Verari Systems is dedicated to protecting the environment by providing data center solutions that are engineered for maximum power efficiency," said David Driggers, chief technology officer of Verari Systems. "By utilizing Western Digital's latest GreenPower technology, Verari is able to provide enterprise customers with a solution that delivers one of the most energy-efficient systems available today."

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's August 2007 report to Congress on Server and Data Center Energy Efficiency1 , 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.

Fully appreciating the storage-energy dilemma, each Western Digital RE2-GP hard drive consumes an average of 4-5 watts less than competitive hard drives, making it possible for energy-conscious enterprise customers to build servers and storage subsystems with higher capacities, consistent performance, and assured reliability, all while promoting energy conservation. By Western Digital estimates, under typical workloads, the new Western Digital 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.

Other 1 TB hard drives typically consume power as high as 13.5 watts. Replacing these drives with Western Digital RE2-GP hard drives will reduce overall annual energy costs, not only through the reduction of drive power consumption, but also through reduced heat and the associated expense of environmental climate controls. To view various needs for a data center, click on Western Digital's GreenPower calculator for enterprise customers at http://www.wdc.com/en/products/greenpower/estimator.asp

"Western Digital's RE2-GP enterprise line of hard drives allow customers to expand their storage needs, reduce their total cost of ownership, and improve the environment all at the same time," said Tom McDorman, vice president and general manager of Western Digital's enterprise business unit. "Energy efficiency is a huge concern for our customers. GreenPower drives are enabling them to meet their customer's system requirements for storage capacity, reliability, performance, and cost by integrating an enterprise-class drive that simply consumes far less power."

Exclusive Intelligent Drive Technology

GreenPower drives from Western Digital deliver exceptional power conservation, run ultra-cool and quiet, while providing solid performance. The following technologies enable the Western Digital RE2-GP platform:

• 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 start up allowing more drives to spin up simultaneously resulting in faster system readiness.

• IntelliSeek - Calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise and vibration.

• IntelliPark - Delivers lower power consumption by automatically unloading recording heads during idle to reduce aerodynamic drag and by disabling read/write channel electronics.

• Active Power Management - Western Digital GreenPower drives monitor work load and automatically invoke idle mode whenever possible to further reduce unnecessary power consumption. Drive recovery time from idle mode is less than one second, providing seamless communication between the drive and the host controller.

Availability and Pricing
Western Digital RE2-GP 500 GB drives (model WD5000ABPS), Western Digital RE2-GP 750 GB drives (model WD7500AYPS) and the Western Digital RE2-GP 1 TB drives (model WD1000FYPS) are available from Quest Network Services. MSRP is $149.99, $249.99 and $349.99 respectively. More information about Western Digital RE2-GP enterprise drives may be found on the company's Web site at http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=385
About Western DigitalWestern Digital, one of the storage industry's pioneers and long-time leaders, provides products and services for people and organizations that collect, manage and use digital information. The company produces reliable, high-performance hard drives that keep users' data close-at-hand and secure from loss.
Western Digital was founded in 1970. The company's storage products are marketed to leading systems manufacturers, selected resellers and retailers under the Western Digital and WD brand names. Visit the Investor section of the company's Web site (http://www.westerndigital.com) to access a variety of financial and investor information.