CES 2008: Western Digital My Book & Caviar GP

WD My Book External Drives and the Caviar GP

Western Digital has released four new products to their My Book product line. For those that are unfamiliar, the My Book external drive is sleekly shaped like a small book and can easily fit on a bookshelf for easy storage. They also have a Mac theme with a few of the drives specifically formatted for the Mac.

Kingston played on the upcoming BCS Championship game tonight by wrapping a couple of My Book external drives in a skin that Skin It has designed specifically for the My Book although it is unknown exactly when consumers will be able to purchase a skin from Skin It’s website.

The first of the new My Book external drives is the Essential Edition 2.0. This is the second generation of this mainstream part and brings the ability for the external drive to automatically turn on and off when the user’s computer turns on and off. This was previously a feature that was reserved for the higher end My Books. The Essential Edition 2.0 utilizes a USB 2.0 interface.

Next in line is the Home Edition. This version of the My Book brings the best of both worlds of the previous Premium Edition and Premium ES Edition. The Home edition offers a capacity gauge that easily lets the user know how full the external drive is. This drive also offers automatic backup to ensure data safety. The Home Edition also allows the user to use either a USB 2.0, Firewire 400, or eSATA connection.

The My Book Office Edition offers the same features as the Home Edition with the additional ability to remotely access and securely share files that are on this external drive. However, this feature is available for Windows users only. The Office Edition utilizes a USB 2.0 connection like the Essential Edition 2.0.

The forth My Book edition released is the Studio Edition. This version is formatted for Macintosh systems and has all the features as the Home Edition. However one additional feature offered on the Studio Edition is the support for Firewire 800 for very high speed data transfer rates!

Western Digital also announced their new Caviar GP to bring “Green Power” to your hard disk drive. The whole purpose of the Caviar GP is to lower the power consumption of the drive to promote a more environmentally friendly PC. WD claims to have lowered power consumption by up to 40%, or 4 to 5 watts, over competator’s drives by implementing their new IntelliSeek, IntelliPark and IntelliPower technologies.

The IntelliSeek technology calculates the optimum seek speeds to reduce power and vibrations. IntelliPark disengages the hard drive heads when the drive is at idle in order to reduce aerodynamic drag when the platers are spinning. The IntelliPower technology allows the GP drives to maintain a balance between spin speed, transfer rate and caching algorithms in order to provide energy savings without sacrificing solid performance. WD also noted that the Caviar GP is a great candidate for external drive enclosures due to their cool running and power efficient performance.

Western Digital has done a nice job of delivering on new products to keep their product lines fresh and innovative. Green Power could prove to be a big marketing point for WD as that is a big theme this year in the tech industry as many consumers are looking to lower energy costs.