Slashdot has a discussion on Western Digital’s new low-power consumption Caviar GP hard drives – the GP standing for GreenPower. It turns out that not only do the drives save about 10W of power over other hard drives with similar specs, but these drives are some of the quietest hard drives around, making them ideal for quiet rooms and anyone doing home studio recording with their computer (or just anyone who likes a quiet computer).
These drives are great if you’re using a desktop system, but they still use more power than a typical laptop drive, or a solid-state disk drive with no spinning platter. Unless you really need a desktop, a laptop remains the computer to use for the least power consumption (and they also happen to be far more practical for surfing the web from your sofa).