What is Difference Between WD HDD Blue, Black, Green, Purple, Red & Gold

 

Western Digital WD10EZEX 1TB Internal Hard Drive for Desktop (Blue)

We start with the most cost effective and budget drive of all, the WD Blue HDD series. These are designed with low level access and long term use in mind. Once these would have been recommended for use for your operating system inside a non mission-critical PC (general browsing etc), but now with the inexpensive of SSD in 128-512GB and it becoming ideal for your operating system, start up and primary apps, the WB Blue hard drive has been demoted to basic storage use. You should not use WD Blue in a RAID and is cheifly designed for everyday storage needs where Read and Write speeds are not paramount.

The WD Red Hard Drive for NAS and RAID needs

Possibly the most well know WD HDD Color we will talk about today, WD Red is the Drive you need for your NAS Server. If you are looking at buying a brand new Synology NAS for your home or a beefed up QNAP NAS for your business, then it is paramount you get HDD Media that is designed to not only be ready for sporadic and irregular read and write (as your access to the NAS Server will differ constantly) but also Hard Disk media that is designed to be on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. In this environment, a  WD Blue is just no longer suited and though will perfect the job, will do so much slower and is susceptible to errors and potential HDD Failure. Moreover if your network attached storage data is mission critical, of sentimental value or just plain impossible to replace (thinking of my original recording of ‘Bernard and the Genie’), then you will no doubt have more than one HDD in the NAS enclosure, in a RAID volume. Drives in a RAID have to work that little bit harder as data is spread over the drives for redundancy (so the data is duplicated) like butter over toast! WD Red Drives are designed to be used in this RAID environments too and for greater lengths of time.

Finally, WD Red HDDs have firmware onboard that controls the disks behaviour in a NAS server, catering from everything vibration and temperature sensitivity, all the way through to intelligent spin speed and cache allocation. So, if you are looking to populate a NAS, then definitely go for WD Red. Also see below for the WD Red Pro series for Enterprise NAS use and enclosures with more than 4 or 5 HDD Bays.

WD Green Series of Hard Drives for Lower Power

 Consumption

The WD Green series, once very popular, is largely overlooked these days. This is once again largely due to the manufacturing technique of HDD becoming far more efficient, as well as SSD media becoming lower in price. That said, if you require a single HDD for backup storage, a secondary media source or just to be used occasionally, then the WD Green series may well be for you. They are designed to use less power than other Hard Drives as well as producing less vibration or heat whilst in use. This of course does mean they are available in smaller capacities and the read and write is of a lower speed, so these should never be used as a primary OS Boot drive or for a large scale RAID enclosure (early varients were but since then much more tailored drives have been released)

The WD Black Series for those that need rugged, enduring,

 fast long-term data stability

Another Hard Drive type that those with a background in PC building and Photo Editing will be aware of. WD Black HDD are designed for high performance Hard Disk media use. If you require  large capacity HDD for your files for editing, or in a large scale Direct Attached Storage (DAS) enclosure, then the WD Black series will more than likely be the drive for you. They are seen as the drive of choice of large scale media editors due to their balance of large capacity vs access speeds.of course, you will get faster speeds from using an SSD but you shouldn’t really RAID SSDs beyond a RAID 0 or RAID 1 and moreover the price per GB of an SSD is subtantially higher than that of a WD Black Drive. With a dedicated 7200 RPM, 128MB Cache and 5 Year warranty, the western digital black drive is the choice for those that was reliability, speed and

The WD Purple Series for CCTV, Network and Direct 

Recording Surveillance needs

Released only a few years ago, the WD Purple HDD series is designed for Surveillance requirements. You might think that when using multiple IP or Cable Surveillance cameras in the home, office or retail sector, that you should only really think about the quality of hte cameras. This is sort of true – the better the camera, the more features and better recording. However if will all come to nothing if the Hard Drive media you are writing to is unsuitable. Unlike almost all other HDD use across all environments, Hard Disks used in Surveillance are more than 95% used for Writing and 5% for reading – i.e footage is recorded and written to the drives constantly and only accessed rarely by comparison (the reading of the disk). So, if you have x5 or x10 Relatively high recording cameras sending 2 or 5MB of recorded footage constantly, then you will need to ensure that both the recording server can keep up and that the drives are designed to record the data incoming as fast as it arrives! This is where WD Purple shines.

They are desisgned to keep up with this heavy writing behaviour in a NAS or DAS system, suitable for doing this whilst in a RAID 5 or RAID 6 and are designed to be powered on and in use for weeks and months at a time. So if you need a Drive for recording footage from CCTV IP cameras or Cable-to-Camera cables, or are even jsut looking for drives for a NAS that you plan to use as for surveillance in the background, then go for the WD Purple series as it will provide the most stable and reliable result possible. Additionally, if you are using a Network video recording device (NVR), that you use the NVR specialised WD Purple NVR HDD

The WD Gold Series for Data Centers, Bulk Cold Storage

 solutions and High Capacity Workloads

The most recent addition to the WD Colors collection. The WD Gold series is designed for Data Centers (or Data Centres!) or long term cold storage in smaller RAID arrays. They arrive with a much more rugged, long term chassis design as they will be HEAVILY used! To back up this level of use, WD provide a 5 Year warranty on these drives. Also, it is well known that Data Centers get through drives much quicker than most HDD Media environments and though the WD Gold Series (available in both SATA and SAS) are more expensive than most hard drives, this cost will pale into comparison to if you filled your data center with WD Blue or WD Green drives and they required replacement more often – as well as the Read and Write operations on the non-gold drives being efficiency and productivity down too. WD Have a long history of Data Center hard drives before they rebranded to the Gold series. Each kind of drive (tailed to different center and use types) was built with longevity in mind, but with names like Xe, Re and Se, they simplified matters and created the Gold Series to make it easier to comprehend.