Western Digital recently introduced a line of “GreenPower” hard drives that “deliver power savings as the primary attribute.” A typical hard drives takes up 13.5 watts of power in your PC. The Caviar GP drives cut that down to a nice 3.3 watts (with the 500GB model) for PCs that need reliability and reduced energy consumption. Today, we’re taking a look at the Caviar GP 500GB hard drive.

The “GreenPower” line comes in 500GB, 750GB, and 1TB capacities. All the drives run from 5400RPM to 7200RPM, which is what Western Digital calls IntelliPower which delivers a “fine-tuned balance of spin speed, transfer rate, and caching algorithms designed to deliver both significant power savings and solid performance.”

In short, the GreenPower drives automatically adjusts RPM to save energy when performance isn’t needed for the task at hand. We tested the Caviar GP 500GB hard drive inside of a Core 2 Duo-based PC. The GP 500GB isn’t the top performer in our testing, but it certainly should do the job for those looking for lower power consumption and a quiet drive. Combine the reduced power consumption with Western Digital’s 3-year warranty, and you’ve got yourself a great hard drive.

In our benchmarks, the Western Digital Caviar GP was a decent performer. Using HDTach we received a burst speed of 188.8 MB/s and an average read speed of 61.1 MB/s. The Windows Experience Index gave it a rating of 5.9, which is the highest score a hard drive can get after running the tests on Windows Vista. We’re not sure if it is reporting an accurate representation of performance at this time. The HDTach speeds should give you a general idea of the performance. It isn’t a Raptor, but it should be fine for most computing tasks.

The Western Digital “GreenPower” line of hard drives is available today from many online retailers like Newegg.com and Western Digital. The 500GB model retails for $149.99.

Pros

• Average performance.
• Very quiet.
• Reduces power consumption in PCs.
• 3-year warranty.

Cons

• Not the fastest drive in it’s class.

Final Verdict
4.5 out of 5 stars.

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