Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, which acquired IBM's hard drive operations, has announced a new line of eco-friendly hard drives which are to employ state-of-the-art power consumption technologies to significantly reduce their power footprint.

This is Hitachi's latest line of one- and two-platter drives, the Deskstar P7K500, having up to 250GB per platter, and are available in 250GB, 320GB, 400GB, and 500GB capacities, in either Parallel ATA or Serial ATA versions. They employ a different technology than that showcased in Western Digital's recently announced Green Power drives. Western Digital chose to reduce the RPMs of the hard drive while idle from the nominal 7200rpm to a lower 5400rpm. Instead, "7200 rpm is what our desktop customers want," says Lee Johnson, 3.5-inch product marketing manager at Hitachi.

The new Deskstar P7K500 desktop hard drive allegedly cuts power requirements by up to 40 percent over its predecessor T7K500 offering, using 7 watts of power -- about 14 percent of the overall system requirement for a an Energy Star-compliant PC. Johnson said "our [power consumption] specs are up to 59 percent better than the competition. We've reduced idle power by 40 percent as compared with our previous drives, the T7K500." Hitachi's 250-Gbyte is rated at a mere 3.6 watts while idling, versus the 4.8 watts in idle mode for the 500-Gbyte model, Hitachi said.

These improvements are the sum of several innovations, which start with the port of their highly successful HiVERT voltage regulation technology over from its notebook drives to its desktop drives. However, there are similarities with Western Digital's Green Power drives. The most notable one is that both hard disk lines use intelligent parking technology to move the heads for a significant reduction in consumed power.

"We've improved efficiency by using switching regulators instead of linear regulators as we're converting the voltages down to those used by the electronic components," explains Jim Wong, senior product strategist at Hitachi, quoted by PC World. "In addition, with this new system-on-chip design, we also have a more power efficient core module for SATA and PATA interfaces."