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#1021
I've ignored this curiosity too long:
What is the translation of all the different color codes for Western Digital drives?
Black = High Performance
Green = Power Saving
Red = ?
Blue =?
Are there any other colors to think about?
Internal Desktop Hard Drives Overview
IMHO:
Black=high performance
Green=good for laptops and battery but kinda slow-better to just get ssd
RED=server, constant on drives (made with dependability in mind)
blue=everyday computing
purple-=ctv systems
Yet my 1TB Blue is faster than my 2TB black for backups. Wish they made a 2TB Blue - blue's are limited to 1 TB or less.
I would recommend Blues over Greens for laptops. In fact, most WD drives installed by manufacturers into laptops are Blues. Greens do use less power, which one would think would lead to better battery life, but, since they are slower, they may have to run longer to accomplish the same thing a blue can do in less time so battery savings are probably a wash. A Black would gain little over a Blue in a laptop and would shorten battery life a bit.
I use Blacks for storage in my desktop machine. The speed difference between a Green and a Black is quite noticeable, even when used only for data storage. I probably wouldn't see much, if any. difference between a Blue and a Black speed wise but Blues are limited to only 1TB maximum capacity while Blacks go up to 4 TB. Also, Blues have only a two year warranty while Blacks are five year; that suggests that the Blacks would be more reliable and longer lasting than the Blues. I run my desktop machine 24/7 so I need HDDs I can depend on. The five year warranty assures me I won't need to pay out of pocket (other than one way shipping) to replace a dead drive for five years.
I use Greens for my backups. Since they run only a few minutes a day, they should last a long time and are a good, economical choice due to the light use I give them. They also run a bit cooler than the Blacks so running them in a swap bay with no air movement won't overheat them (although I've yet to overheat a Black either). I wouldn't use a Green in a machine that ran 24/7.
The only Blues I have are three 160GB 2.5" HDDs, two of which I cannibalized from dead netbooks. I original used them for backup drives for my SSD but they are in storage for now.
Reds were design for use in desktop NAS boxes. They are not very suitable for everyday computing and user reviews have not been all that good on them, possibly because people may be using them in wrong applications.
The Purples are the newest line and are designed strictly for video surveillance systems. Normally, when moving data to a drive, if a hiccough occurs during the write to the destination drive, the read from the source can be interrupted long enough to clear the hiccough. However, a video feed can't be interrupted so the destination drive has to keep on writing, no matter what, to minimize picture loss. Using a purple drive for anything other than video recording could result in file corruption.
What that chart does not explain is that all but the Red drives and the RE class, I believe, are not suited for raid, if you intend to use it. WD has taken the TLER off of the desktop drives and only include it on the more expensive drives, with the exception of the Red drives.
True, that. The Blacks and the more expensive REs get about the same customer reviews but the specs for the Blacks show them to be a tad quieter and, IIRC, a bit faster than the REs so, unless running RAID, there is no advantage to shelling out extra for the REs.
The Reds can be thought of as essentially being Greens with TLER (although that isn't the only difference) so they can be used in RAID.
There are some oddball WD Green variants out there that differ slightly in weight for a given capacity, indicating a different number of platters---even though they are the exact same model number.
Note the difference in the pix of the Green 3 TB versions below. Both are EZRX series. The first one has 3 platters of 1 TB each and weighs about 645 grams. The other has 4 short-stroked 1 TB platters, yielding the same 3 TB capacity. It weighs over 670 grams. One is Malaysian, the other from Thailand. Both manufactured in September 2013.
The 3 platter version is more common, but you never know till you break open the box. The 3 platter version might be more quiet and run slightly cooler. If I recall, short-stroking can have a beneficial effect on effective speed, but that might not be of much importance for a Green buyer anyway.