If you have ever shopped for Western Digital Hard Disk Drives (WD HDD), you have seen that they are available in different color codes. This might create confusion in your mind about which type of WD HDD you have to buy. The different color WD HDDs are manufactured for different purposes. In this article, we will see what is the difference between the different color WD HDDs.
WD Hard Drive colors comparison
You are well aware of Western Digital. It is among the best hard disk drive manufacturers. WD HDDs have six color codes: blue, red, black, green, purple, and gold. Let’s have a deeper look into the meaning of the different color codes of WD hard disk drives.
1] WD Blue HDD
Let’s begin our discussion with the Western Digital Blue HDD. It is a general-purpose hard drive that is manufactured for basic desktop and long-term usage. People can use these hard drives for daily activities like storing different types of files and casual gaming. The storage capacity of these hard drives varies from 250 GB to 6 TB.
WD Blue HDDs are available in two models, 5400 RPM with a maximum storage capacity of 6 TB and 7200 RPM with a maximum storage capacity of 2 TB.
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2] WD Red HDD
WD Red HDD is designed for NAS and RAID systems. Hence, these hard drives are most commonly used by small businesses. NAS stands for Network Attached Storage. It is a storage media that is connected to a particular network. The purpose of using a NAS system in an organization is to form a central location to store data. You can consider NAS as a private cloud network for small businesses. On the other hand, RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) is a system that lets you store the data on multiple hard drives. All the configured hard drives act as a single storage system under the RAID system.
Today, many organizations operate 24×7 with employees working in rotational shifts. Such organizations need 24×7 access to the storage media. Hence, in such circumstances, the WD Blue HDDs do not withstand as they are designed only for general purposes. The pro version of WD Red hard drive is available with a storage capacity of as high as 18 TB.
3] WD Green HDD
WD Green hard drives were manufactured for low power consumption. If a user requires a hard drive for backup storage, or simply for storing his files, he can use WD Green HDD. Because people started giving more preference to WD Blue hard drives, Green HDD started losing their popularity. Due to this reason, Western Digital stopped manufacturing the Green HDD.
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4] WD Black HDD
Western Digital manufactures the black color HDD series for those who want an external storage medium with high performance. Due to the high performance, WD Black hard drives are much popular among photo editors and high-end gamers. If we compare WD Black HDD with WD Blue HDD, the former one offers 128 MB of cache, whereas, the latter one offers only 64 MB of cache. Also, all the versions of WD Black HDD come with 720 RPM which is far better than the RPM offered by WD Blue HDD. In short, if you are looking for a hard disk drive that lasts longer, offers high speed and reliability, WD Black HDD will be the right choice.
5] WD Purple HDD
WD Purple HDD series is specially designed for surveillance systems. The surveillance systems require storage media on which data can be written 24×7. Apart from this, the storage media should have a high capacity for storing high-definition videos. WD Purple HDD perfectly fits these requirements. You may have a question here, “WD Red HDD series also offer 24×7 data storage facility, so, why these hard drives cannot be used for CCTV surveillance systems?” This is because surveillance videos are required to be accessed when someone commits a crime in a particular area. This means that the hard disks in surveillance systems are used more for writing than reading the data. This is not the case with WD Red HDD. Because Red hard drives are used in organizations, employees need them frequently to access the data. This means these hard drives are used equally for both writing and reading the data. Like Red hard drives, Purple hard drives can also be configured for NAS and RAID storage systems.
6] WD Gold HDD
The WD Gold HDD provides a long-term cold storage medium. Therefore, this series of Western Digital hard drives is suitable for data centers. These hard drives can handle many sophisticated systems simultaneously and work well with different servers. The gold edition of WD hard drives has a maximum storage capacity of 10 TB and offers 7200 RPM with 128 MB or 256 MB cache. Gold hard drives are also suitable for 24×7 applications and can handle a workload of 550 TB per year.
Let’s summarize what we have discussed in this article.
- WD Blue HDD: It is a general-purpose, reliable, and power-efficient storage medium.
- WD Red HDD: It is manufactured for NAS and RAID systems.
- WD Green HDD: It consumes less power and is similar to the blue series hard drives. The Green edition is not popular nowadays.
- WD Black HDD: It is a high-performance hard drive and is designed for high-end gaming and content creation applications.
- WD Purple HDD: It is a surveillance system storage device.
- WD Gold HDD: It is a premium version of WD hard drives and is designed for data centers and other similar applications.
We hope this article helped you understand the difference between the different WD hard drive colors.
You may also like to read: What is a Hybrid Drive?
