Should I have bought the WD Black?

warustar

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Jun 6, 2013
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I recently ordered and received a 1TB 7200/64MB SATA 6gb/s WD Blue HDD.
After reading around online, WD Black obviously seems to be the fastest, but should I regret what I bought? Is the difference massive? I do some gaming, video editing, and other graphic-oriented tasks.

The WD Black that I'm looking at is a 1TB 7200/64MB SATA 3gb/s. It's about a 30 dollar difference, and I'm going to have to wait even more to return and wait for the Black to arrive. Is it worth all of this? Or would sticking to my Blue be alright?

Thanks in advance for everyone's input.
 
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IMO, no, you should not regret your decision.

I understand that a lot of people really prefer WD Black, but the Newegg ratings for the 1TB Blue and 1TB Black are almost...

drewhoo

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Apr 5, 2012
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IMO, no, you should not regret your decision.

I understand that a lot of people really prefer WD Black, but the Newegg ratings for the 1TB Blue and 1TB Black are almost identical in proportion (avg 4 star for each). The issue that matters in performance is that a 7200rpm hdd is only going to be so fast because it's a mechanical hdd. Provided your motherboard supports it, you would do better to buy an identical blue and make a RAID 0 volume. That would certainly outperform a black drive by quite a lot, and you'd have double the space (though also double the likelihood of a drive failing). RAID 0 write and read speeds are equal to the number of drives in the volume times the slowest drive's read or write speed. So the more you add, the faster it gets. If you're into performance, you should RAID, not try to buy a faster HDD, and just make sure the drives operate at 7200 RPM.

If you're into reliability (I'm only addressing this because it is a common reason cited for paying extra for black drives), don't buy consumer drives. Get an enterprise drive (like the WD RE4) with an unrecoverable error rate of 1 in 1e15 (both blue and black have URE rates of 1 in 1e14, which means that you can read about 10TB of data off of the drive before it becomes likely that it will fail). QC has been poor since the floods so even buying Blacks is a bit of a crapshoot.
 
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