Western Digital today announced a new family of energy efficient hard drives. The WD RE2 GreenPower series comes in three capacities:  500MB, 750MB and 1000MB.

Tony Gaughan, Chief Products Officer of Rackable Systems at WD, said that the new hard drives deliver power savings of up to 40 percent compared to currently available products.

While such announcements might not mean much for the average desktop user, WD points out that data centers accounted for 1.5 percent of total energy consumption in the U.S. last year. In plain numbers, data centers gobbled up a whopping 61 billion Kilowatt-hours, which amounts to $4.5 billion; and, as you can see, energy efficient products are not only environmentally friendly but also have the potential to substantially reduce operating costs for major companies.

The company estimates that a single GreenPower hard drive can save as much as $10 in power costs over a year of use under typical workloads.

The MSRP is US$149.99 for the 500GB model, $249.99 for the 750MB model and $349.99 for the top range 1TB model. The new drives are available here and you can find out more on the product page, here.