Hitachi brings out green Deskstar drives

Hitachi on Monday morning turned its attention to the environment and released the Deskstar P7K500, a new range of desktop hard drives focused on conserving power. The design is made for environmentally conscious hobbyists and computer designers and uses smarter power management to tangibly improve the active and idling power consumption. Active power use drops to as little as 6.4 watts for a single-platter drive and 8.2 watts for a two-platter model; when a drive is inactive, power use drops to as little as 3.6 watts, Hitachi says. The drop amounts to as much as a 59 percent reduction versus a typical desktop drive and can result in either more available power for other components in a system or else lower overall power use.

Drives vary in capacity between 250GB and 500GB and should be available in volume towards the end of the year at prices to be set later. Hitachi typically sells some of its drives as stand-alone devices to home users as well as to system builders, which can use the device in pre-assembled systems.