Gadgetory

Western Digital lineup has changed significantly since we defined its naming scheme in 2014 since then the company has expanded into SSDs has reduced rpm on some WD blue drives and has all that killed the Western Digital green series drive today we're defining the differences between WD blue black red and purple hard drives and I'm looking into the new WD green blue and black SSDs every now and then we do a naming convention content to go through manufacturers and their numerous names that don't always make a whole lot of sense like the msi video we did not want to go and the h1 prior to that today we're focusing on WD and the rainbow of colors for hard drives again red blue black green purple for the most part and then some of the same for SSDs Seagate has another hard drive vendor uses a similar naming scheme but there's all creature name so Skyhawk iron wolf and barracuda would be theirs look at those in the future this content by the way has already been published on the website so if you want the tables that were to be talking through here you can hit the link in the description below for the full article where Eric Hamilton has done all the legwork to define these differences the briefest overview possible of each Drive is that WD purple probably the least known of all of these is used for meant to be used for surveillance systems WD red is meant to be used for network attached storage or raid configurations within at your desktop and then WD blue is kind of a mainstream Drive and WD black is the mainstream posh one it's a little bit higher end than the mainstream drives but we'll talk about these specific differences as we go through them now when it comes to hard drives you can still use these pretty much however you want you could use WD red as a standalone Drive in your system if you wanted to even though it's meant to be used in a raid you could use WD purple as your game storage drive and he really wanted to so there's no hard limitation to what these can do it's just where they're geared towards and what technologies are inside of the drives how the controller is configured things like that there was a brief period that some folks may remember where WD Reds were a better buy than WD blues because they were the same rpm same capacity and in some cases we're cheaper that's not really something that exists anymore but it shows that if you do some digging and you don't need exactly the feature set in a particular Drive you could get away with using one of the other ones often for cheaper or at a greater capacity than might be available in the whatever series you were originally hoping to buy WD blue is the most common Western Digital Drive that we recommend for gaming storage alongside Seagate's alternatives but we do so carefully with the WD blues these days the previous WD green line has been consumed by WD blue it's dead for hard drives you won't find WD green anymore and that means that Western Digital now offers both 5400 rpm and 7200 rpm WD blue drives at one terabyte and up it is technically a 500 gigabyte capacity but those are being phased out everywhere because the platter density doesn't much make sense for 500 gigabytes these days so we need blue at 7200 rpm is what we'd recommend for most game storage or higher density media like RAW files but you'll need to be sure that you're not act as a heli behind a 5400 rpm variants because they exist again in several capacities the one terabyte WD blue Drive at 7200 rpm is sort of as far as Western Digital offerings the go-to for gaming storage we would recommend the archiving your games there rather than a 5400 rpm Drive at a higher capacity because the speed difference is noticeable particularly with certain types of media and then as for potential downsides the blue drives really only lack a few features one of them is the vibration protection which the usefulness of that is sort of debatable unless you really have the on off times and needs a longer service life of a WD black drive and then there is time limited error recovery or TL er that is also not found on WD blue so if that's something you specifically want don't buy a blue as for capacities the 7200 rpm version is limited to one terabyte so if you want more than that you're going to have to go to WD black unless you're okay with getting the 2 terabyte and higher 5400 rpm Drive which we generally would not recommend for gaming storage or for any type of media that needs to be accessed more quickly now for long-term archival storage it's just fine the more noticeable difference is the 2 year warranty on the WD blue drives and the fact that they're significantly cheaper per gigabytes as nwv black at around $50 for one terabyte of 200 rpm versus 1 terabyte 7200 rpm black for $77 so you've got a $27 gap there WG Blue is available up to 6 terabytes for $200 but these capacities only spin at 5400 rpm again are for both storage the WD blue drives have historically used Marvell controllers and then Samsung chips for the cash on those drives getting into WD black now the difference again 5-year warranty out the gate is the biggest most noticeable one and then they primarily differentiate themselves in speed so they're all 7200 rpm from 500 gigabytes up to 6 terabytes and the six terabyte model was just sort of the flagship of these WD black drives has a higher amount of platters in it so it's 5 platters at one point 2 terabytes each which is how you get your 6 terabytes give or take and the black drive also has 10 total read or write heads in it and that maximizes the data density per platter and it also minimizes the travel required of the heads in the unit the previous WD black 4 terabyte drive had half the D Ram cache as the current 128 megabytes with the cash provided by Nana na nya accompanied by a dual-core controller from LSI or what's left of them anyway WD black folks is less on noise and WD blue but does include vibration protection features with that 5 year warranty the only two hard drives left the WD red drives are meant for nasty usage so your network-attached storage we actually need three WD red 2 terabyte drives are a couple years old now in raid 5 in our render machine which we showed when we were rebuilding the thin and they've been great for that kind of usage the largest capacity WD red is 8 terabytes at $330 and the 8 terabyte models interestingly use helium to seal them rather than air there's a lot heavier and so using helium means that they can fit an additional 1.2 terabyte platter within the chassis of the hard drive totaling at 7 platters which also encounter reduced resistance because it's spinning through helium rather than spinning through air this features only on a few of the WD red drives like the a terabyte model and in general is useful because lower friction from our resistance means lower heat and consequently reduce power draw the Helio CL Tech is only in that a terabyte unit and other specs of WD red drives includes significantly faster load and unload cycle ratings I've seen it an hour table that we have on the site we're hopefully on the screen now and they've also got better service life expected over there alternatives from WD they terabyte read drives have fourteen read and write heads as opposed to for example the six terabyte black drives with ten another lfi controller within them and 128 megabytes of cache WD red drives also critically have some error recovery for raid configurations which is important if you actually want to use a raid and they have Nats we're included and a three year warranty so a bit better than blue in that regard they do tend to spin a bit slower though depending again on which blue you're looking at so that we use WD purple which is all that's left this is the one that's meant for survelliance is again the least popular so as a surveillance drive it is of course going to be running writes pretty much non-stop doesn't have much other purpose in life than running writes for whatever camera system it's configured to work with and that means mostly steady-state runtimes and as such there's custom firmware and caching built to handle those non-stop right WD purple drives have an annualized workload of 180 terabytes per year backed by a three-year warranty because these drives write non-stop and then overwrite footage as they go this rating is critical for the nearly 100% of times for security purposes the drives also used something WD calls all frame technology which theoretically reduces pixelation and frame loss and video capture so that's not our specialty so we can't really count on how well it works TL ER and 80 a streaming command sets are also supported in the WD purple drives pricing of WD purple is comparable to other Zen WDS lineup with four terabytes priced at $135 moving on to Western Digital SSDs that we see a parallel arrangement of the drive colors to the hard drive counterparts Green is the low end blue is the mainstream market and black is sort of the performance market and it's currently pre-order only so we have an act test one of the black as a sea chest yet the pricing for these is also in the same hierarchy green blue black with WD green starting out about $75 for 240 gigabytes blue filling the mid-range market one terabyte for $260 or 250 gigabytes for $85 and then the W black SSDs on pre-order for $200 at 512 gigabytes the WD green SSD is a dram list configuration on 15 nanometer TL seen and supported by SMI controllers the SSD is rated only for 37,000 IOPS for K read and 63,000 to 4k write significantly slower than most competition on the market and falling into WDS weak points which is SSD competitive price positioning vs. performance because it is a heavily saturated market at this point that we be blue uses the SanDisk X 400 as a foundation but with custom firmware and different drive capacities on SanDisk's offerings GG blue also uses 15 nanometer planar NAND which is something we described in our what is NAND animation and video previously and deploys a Marvel controller with micron be Ram on the drive blue drives focus on higher endurance aiming for better than average as their targets positioning and push endurance as a more critical aspect of the drive than speed the blue warranty stands at 3 years and might be more competitively positioned at than the Green Drive WD blue SSDs are rated around at ninety seven thousand IOPS read at 250 gigabytes or seventy nine thousand IOPS right form factors are available for 2.5 inch and m2 2286 both on the SATA 3 interface and the interface isn't completely saturated here but it's getting close finally WD black SOC is sent at the top of the stack again and are going to be available in 56 and 512 at capacities immediately they're not out yet pre-order right now at time of filming and a time of filming again those commuters are at 110 dollars with 256 model and $200 for the 512 gigabyte model the difference here with WD black versus blue and green is that doubly black uses the PCIe interface says it's transfer medium rather than theta and that is on PCIe by four lanes this shifts only in an m2 2280 stick form factor and it's rated for two gigabytes per second read tremendous improvement over the WD blue SSD with 700 to 800 megabytes per second write random ratings are 170 K IOPS read and 130k IOPS writes for 256 gigabytes with an increased average power rating of 135 milliwatts over the setting milliwatts of WD blue w black SSDs includes the same 5-year warranty as WD black hard drives leaving some parallelism between the two and that pretty much wraps up the differences between the Western Digital hard drives and solid state drives so hopefully the colors make more sense now the hard drives are once you understand those everything else is easy basically again blue is mainstream black is high-end green is avoid and there might be some validity to green SSDs but the price of the same is not great right now for their performance and then red and purple are sort of these special outliers red bean raid 4 will be in surveillance probably no one in our audience really needs that for the most part but it might be a good buy if you can find them cheap just because they are a lower volume at least in this market type of product so article links in description below for the full tables and all of this stuff recapped in text if you prefer that format thank you again for watching go to patreon.com/crashcourse max ourselves out directly or click the link the postal video subscribe for more content I'll see you all next time you you