WD Red Drives Compared with WD Blue, Black, Purple

[Bernd Strauss]

Hello,

One source shows that a WD Red drive has 600,000 load/ unload cycles, whereas Blue, Green, Black, and Purple drives are shown to have 300,000. Red drives also have helium instead of air inside and are designed for NAS and RAID 24 hours seven days a week. Therefore, in terms of safe data storage, is it correct to say that WD Red drives are better than the drives of all the other colors?

 

[USAFRet]

1. Not all Red drives have helium in them. Only the newer, very large capacity.
2. 'better' completely depends on use case.
A Red may be more stable, but also 'slower' than a WD Black. If what you're looking for is performance, then something else might be in order.

For a NAS box? Sure. That is what they are designed for.

 

[geofelt]

This article might help:
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Understanding-the-WD-Rainbow-674/

 

[Bernd Strauss]

Thank you for the information. I have now bought a WD Red drive, because it seems to be designed to be more durable than the drives of the other colors in terms of data storage. The WD customer support also gave such recommendation.