Western Digital launched a new line of environmentally conscious hard drives on monday that can use 40% less energy. The GreenPower drives can save more than $10 per drive per year in electricity costs. WD estimates that for a datacenter with 10,000 hard drives, this can add up to $100,000 in annual energy costs and reduce CO2 emissions by 600 metric tons. Obviously, a datacenter of that size would not switch out all their hard drives because that would probably cost a lot more than $100,000, but the theory in cost efficiency sounds good. Here are the following technologies that these new GreenPower hard drives include:

• IntelliPower(TM): A fine-tuned balance of spin speed, transfer rate and cache size designed to deliver both significant power savings and solid performance.

• IntelliPark(TM): Delivers lower power consumption by automatically unloading the heads during idle to reduce aerodynamic drag.

• IntelliSeek(TM): Calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise and vibration.

The new line of hard drives is set to come out this quarter but there are no prices released yet. The hard drives will be at 5400 RPM, which helps reduce the noise; there’s still no evidence that they will outperform regular drives at 7200RPM. The performance will be a key factor in comparing these drives to regular hard drives, and it will be interesting to see reviews and comparisons when these hard drives come out.