Western Digital is going “green” with its new hard drive models. These new hard drive models, known as the “GP” (Green Power) product line, will arrive in sizes from 320GB to 1TB and should start shipping in late July and early August in some of the My Book series hard drives.

WD claims that these new hard drives can offer users a power saving of $10 per year when compared with other hard drives. The new drives are Energy Star 4.0 compliant and are the first hard drives to receive this certification. Normally, a WD 1TB hard drive uses 13.5 watts, yet the new GP version of the same drive uses just over 5 watts.

The benefits for volume data center users could be big: e.g., if a large company data center has 10,000 drives, it could save as much as $100,000 in annual energy costs and reduce CO2 emission by 600 metric tons. Consumer electronics products such as the Digital Video Recorder could also be big savers, as well.

The question that WD has not addressed is the performance of the GP drives when compared to other WD models. Will going green with your hard drive cause your system to take a performance hit?  Inquiring minds want to know.