Fabrik has announced a new hard drive that sells for around $150 that has an external chassis made from bamboo with other components made from recycled aluminum. The design has changed so that rippled sides act as a heat sink and therefore the unit does not require a fan, lowering energy requirements as well. Bamboo is a renewable resource that is stronger than maple and many other types of wood. The unit's packaging is made from recycled materials and has been re-engineering to be just the minimum necessary to package the hard drive.
Read the press release here and think about supporting these guys if you need a new drive.
Read the press release here and think about supporting these guys if you need a new drive.
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4 comments:
The product is here, and it looks pretty. Thanks for the post, Kevin!
thx for the link aaron...
The MSRP is $159.99 which is about $40 more than you'd expect to pay for any 500GB external drive. But I bought a Drobo, so I can't lecture to anyone about getting ripped off.
A more frugal solution might be to turn off your existing external drive when you're not using it.
Good point on basic energy saving; that's the easiest thing to do. I have recently moved all our computers to power strips, so when we're done we just shut down and then click off the strip.
On materials, one problem with our world economy is that the true costs of things are not weighted. For example, when you deforest 1000 acres someplace, you make a bunch of money on the wood, but there was a cost to the area that is currently not being measured financially. Costs include loss of biodiversity, cultural impacts, the intrusion of farming and pollution or subdivisions, increases in CO2 production, loss of C02 absorbtion, and so on.
Same is true of, say, oil making cheap plastic. Oil is heavily subsidized by the US, mainly with free security that we pay in taxes.
This "soft cost" concept is the core of the book Natural Capitalism. But when you buy something made from recycled metal and bamboo, say, as opposed to the cheapest plastic, then you are having an impact in a positive direction instead of a negative direction, although, of course, a small one, but the idea is to make it cost-effective for all, and profitable to make, so that more and more people buy in on it and thus create a large impact.
You can see this happening with energy today. Wind and solar and other forms are more competitive with "cheap" oil, and so they become more profitable and more attractive to users and providers.
So, there are cheaper models. But the idea could be to support efforts like this with a little extra $$ (which a buyer can think of as an investment in long-term solutions) so that companies making the effort can then over time bring new products in line with others $$-wise, because as Scott points out, people go for the low price, and that's the core rule of the free market.
I could go on for minutes about this.
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