Western Digital Hard Disk Drive Color Explained

There are six colors in the Western Digital HDD series. They are Blue, Green, Red, Purple, Black, and Gold. The green is not much available and already replaced by the blue. The Green one lacked in performance compared to the blue one and its only specialty was power efficiency. We are discussing the rest five colors below to help you choose the perfect one for you.

WD Blue

This is the most used, widely known and all-rounder HDD version. For personal computers at home and offices, this should be the best choice for general purpose use. Their rotation speed is either 5400 or 7200. Their maximum cache memory is 64 MB. For a Desktop computer, WD Blue is recommended in a regular budget.

WD Black

WD Black HDDs are made for those who want to play high-end computer games, deal with large multimedia files that require the fastest data transfer speed with accuracy. So, WD Black HDDs have the highest rotational speed and cache memory compared to all general purpose desktop HDDs. As it is one of the most expensive HDDs for personal computers, you can go for it if you are a serious gamer or you need maximum power in your graphics and multimedia tasks. They become overheated easily, so you will need a better cooling system too.

WD Purple

This type of HDD is made for surveillance purpose such as CCTV cameras, where the hard drive needs to run 24/7. Since the hard drives will be needed mostly for writing data (saving surveillance footage/live videos) other than reading it(playing the video afterward), the WD Purple HDDs are made in such a way that they can achieve the maximum lifespan and the ability to minimize errors. Most WD Purple HDDs have lower rotation speed (5400 rpm) or IntelliPower RPM which automatically changes the speed between 5400 to 7200 from time to time. It helps to reduce power consumption and overheating.

WD Red

It is also known as NAS (Network Assisted Storage) drive. WD Red HDDs are compatible with all NAS systems. No other types of HDD can be fitted into the NAS slots. The read speed of WD Red HDDs is more than the write speed. Many users can read or receive data at the same time from this. As these are mostly used for servers, it supports RAID configuration too.

WD Gold

WD Gold HDDs are made for dealing with huge workloads of data centers. They have the capacity to handle data 10 times the capacity of a general purpose desktop HDD. These enterprise-class storage drives are built to withstand running 24 hours round the year. To ensure the highest reliability, they have an MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) of up to 2.5 million hours. They also have much more cache memory.

Conclusion:

If you have read about all the colors, you should be able to understand what type of HDD you need. To sum up, Blue is for normal usage, Black is for max performance, Purple is for CCTV or Surveillance 24/7, Red is for NAS, Gold is for data centers. You can browse through all popular Hard Disk Drive providing brands from Star Tech website and purchase it online to get it delivered to your doorstep at the lowest price.