WD ships next-gen "green" Caviar drives

Continuing its hard drive updates from earlier in the week, Western Digital today has started shipping the next wave of its Caviar Green eco-friendly drives. The upgrades use a smarter seek algorithm and aggressive caching to drop power use by about 20 percent versus the company's regular hard disks. This next update is also about 10 percent faster than earlier Green drives, according to the company's claims, and uses new storage that carries as much as 333GB per platter on the drive as well as 32MB of cache for every model.

Capacities for the SATA II disks top off at 1TB and also include 500GB, 640GB and 750GB variants. Western Digital doesn't list prices for every model, but says that all should be available today and that the environmental focus lifts the price of the 1TB model to $219.