Everything seems to be about saving the environment these days, and Western Digital's latest drive with the GP badge is all about green computing. GP stands for Green Power, and WD claims these drive are more energy-efficient. The one we have for review is a 1 Terabyte monster. The drive has been developed to give as much performance as possible while keeping power down, by making optimum use of the cache and spin speeds of the drive.

WD claims that the power consumption for the drive is 3-4 Watts less than the others. Considering this is a RAID Edition drive, the performance isn't near the best by any standards. Even the desktop Caviar SE16 drives beat it in many places. The only place file transfers differentiated by just 1 to 2MBps. HD-Tach also recorded similar data transfer rates. In real-world tests where files were copied to and from the drive, the RE2-GP fell behind other drives.

The tempera tures tell the entire story, though. Just by feeling the drives we were using, it was clear the RE2 GP drive was considerably cooler. At around 40 degrees C, the WD RE2 GP ran some 7 degrees C cooler than the others after some intensive benchmarks-which is a lot. It is also very quiet, and the sound of the drive itself is drowned out by any fast fans that may be running-such as the graphics card fan.

The RE2 series isn't aimed at the desktop market. The price for the drive is Rs 17,000, which is a whole lot more than a standard 1 TB drive. The performance is above average, but if low temperatures, reliability and low noise emissions are
necessary, it's something you would want to buy-but it's still is too costly to consider for home use.

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specifications
capacity: 1 TB,
16 MB Buffer,
SATA-II Interface,
Perpendicular recording.