Why Does WD Color-Code Their Drives?

The VCR King

The VCR King

Well-Known Member
I am wanting to buy a 1TB WD hard drive and put it into an enclosure to backup files off my gaming computer, and I saw that there are WD Black, Red, Green, and Blue drives. The main hard drive in my computer that I will be backing up is a 1TB WD Caviar black.

I will be backing up about 630GB of data, and the backups will be run daily because my computer downloads a lot of updates and files while I'm gone for Steam.

Which WD color drive would be best for
1. Constant 24/7 activity, almost never powered off
2. Daily read/write activity for extended periods of time (12 hr at once or more)
3. Fast access to files. I HATE waiting for a hard drive to seek files and take forever.
 
I would say purple or red for your needs.
Red is optimized for low vibration and such, good for many HDDs stacked close together.
Purple is 24/7 operation.
If you need a 1TB drive, I would just find the cheapest purple or red.
 
Jiniix said:
I would say purple or red for your needs.
Red is optimized for low vibration and such, good for many HDDs stacked close together.
Purple is 24/7 operation.
If you need a 1TB drive, I would just find the cheapest purple or red.
Click to expand...
Don't go red, those are for RAIDed NAS units.

Go with blue drives if you're on a budget, or black for performance.
 
WRXGuy1 said:
Don't go red, those are for RAIDed NAS units.

Go with blue drives if you're on a budget, or black for performance.
Click to expand...

^This.

Green = Eco
Blue = Solid Performance
Black = Best Performance
Red = NAS
Purple = 24/7 surveillance
 
I would personally never buy a blue. Then I would go with Seagate Barracuda instead.
I think the purple is the right one here. They call it surveillance, but really it's just optimized for 24/7 usage - which is what OP does.
 
Okay, I might buy one at some point :) It's not like I'm avoiding them like the plague, but here in Denmark, the Barracuda is always $5 cheaper.
Also, I work at a very large IT distributor - and I rarely see any Seagate drives sent in for RMA.
 
Yeah, I'll probably go with the red one because my computer is set so my HDDs never turn off/spin down and the system is run nonstop and heavily used for about 2 weeks at a time before I reboot it.
 
The Blue Beast said:
Yeah, I'll probably go with the red one because my computer is set so my HDDs never turn off/spin down and the system is run nonstop and heavily used for about 2 weeks at a time before I reboot it.
Click to expand...
They aren't for performance, FYI. They are 5900RPM variable speed drives.
 
I don't really need performance that much, I just need something that can handle frequent writing/reading and 24/7 power time.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top