Western Digital Drive Hierarchy

[box o rocks]

Hopefully someone can help me figure out what the 'colors' of WD HDDs represent. I see they have a green series, a blue series, a red series, and a black series. Are they various levels of quality or speed or what exactly do the colors represent?

 

[fil1p]

Hey,

Their Black line is their performance line, basically its designed for desktop use, and provides the best performance from their range of drives. The Blue line is also made for desktops, and it is more of their mainstream line. Their Green line is their power efficient line that uses less power. The green line is not good as a boot drive, but is better as a storage only drive. Their Red drives are designed with NAS (network attached storage) in mind, as they are high capacity, and low power consumption, but once again at the cost of performance. Note that although the green and red line of drives has lower performance they are geared more towards data storage, so if you are building a regular desktop or gaming pc go with the black or blue line.


Hope this helps!

 

[Onus]

It's mostly speed and intended use, some quality (e.g. length of warranty).
The Black drives are the fastest, and I believe are the only consumer drives to have retained a five year warranty since the Thailand floods.
The Red drives are intended for always-on NAS use. I'm not sure if they're truly TLER like enterprise RAID drives, but they should be durable.
Blue drives are a typical consumer drive. Nothing special, but no serious flaws either.
The Green drives are low-power, and are the slowest of their lines. I have read of reliability issues if they are hammered by heavy usage, but they're fine for things like media storage and streaming.
These days I buy WD Black drives myself. They are the fastest of all of them, and there's that five year warranty. I've got some Blue ones still in service though, some going strong well past their warranty period.

 

[hubbardt]

I prefer the blue smarties 🙂