Black or Blue.

[soup]

Probably asked (in slightly different words) a million times but does anyone feel the slight speed increase in speed of a Black drive (western digital) outway any cost savings of a blue drive (WD)?

[ZetZet]

Black is slower in the last reviews (which is hilarious)

[Theo]

I'd take a red personally, fast enough and pretty quiet

[MrYuriy]

Well... The answer is a little more in the gray than simply just a black & white yes or no.

Unless, of course, that person is speaking from his deep pockets or lack of pants.

 

Simply put, it can seem nominal at times, but there are areas where you can usually notice it.

 

If you go for the numbers, benchmarks, etc, yes, WD Black is better, but for what task(s) are you asking about? Gaming? Production?

 

The simple truth is, unless you know exactly what you're looking for and where, WD Blue will be more than plenty, and you'll forget (at points) which WD HDD u bought.

 

Just my synopsis of it. I still buy some Blacks, but majority of the builds I do get Blues.

[DirkW]

Blues are only available up to 1TB, but up to there, they should be just fine. Personally, I don't see much need for faster types of HDDs any more, since you can gain much, much more speed by going with an SSD, and usually most users won't ever need more than a few hundred GB to be fast, for OS and certain applications, as speed is not all that important for data storage.

[ictdude1]

here are how WD colours work,

Blue- everyday hard drives

Black- Performance drives (fastest out of all the colours and longer warranty)

Green- storage drives

Red- nas drives (great for 24/7 running)

Purple- surveillance drives

[soup]

here are how WD colours work,

Blue- everyday hard drives

Black- Performance drives (fastest out of all the colours and longer warranty)

Green- storage drives

Red- nas drives (great for 24/7 running)

Purple- surveillance drives

Yes, I understood that but I was in a bit of a quandary as to whether I was better of with a performance or everday drive . 

 

Was even initially considering Green, as this was to be a storage drive (Booting from an SSD), and felt the low speed would help with the quiteness of the system, however every(ish) review seemed to 'talk' about how crap they were so Green was eliminated pretty early on in the 'consideration process'.

 

I went for Blue BTW as the price difference seemed to far outway any possible slight performance improvement: five years warranty as opposed to three doesn't really bother me as I would tend not to expect more than a couple of years out of a HDD anyway.

[Captain_WD]

Probably asked (in slightly different words) a million times but does anyone feel the slight speed increase in speed of a Black drive (western digital) outway any cost savings of a blue drive (WD)?

 

Hey soup,

 

There is a difference between these two drives and, depending on what you plan on using yours, it may be noticeable or not. 

WD Black has some significant advantages over the WD Blue drives:

-Longer warranty (the drive is basically projected to be safe to work for a longer time)

-Comes in bigger storage space (WD Blue is limited to 1TB while WD Black can go up to 4TB (for now))

-Built-in Dual Core CPU (probably the most underrated feature) alongside with Dynamic Cache boosts the drive's capability to multitask. This brings great advantage over WD Blue when you are writing and reading at the same time as cache is distributed accordingly to provide the best performance possible.

-Additional features in the firmware, that help the drive perform cooler and with less vibrations during peak workloads for a longer time than WD Blue.

 

It is true that newer batches of WD Blue perform better than older batches of WD Black during benchmarks, but, comparing the new models of both drives, WD Black performs better but it costs more.

 

it really depends on what you are going to do with the drive. If it's gaming or simple editing that does not require continuous simultaneous reading and writing on the drive, I would go with WD Blue. Otherwise (and for bigger capacities), I would go with WD Black.

 

Captain_WD.

[ictdude1]

Yes, I understood that but I was in a bit of a quandary as to whether I was better of with a performance or everday drive . 

 

Was even initially considering Green, as this was to be a storage drive (Booting from an SSD), and felt the low speed would help with the quiteness of the system, however every(ish) review seemed to 'talk' about how crap they were so Green was eliminated pretty early on in the 'consideration process'.

 

I went for Blue BTW as the price difference seemed to far outway any possible slight performance improvement: five years warranty as opposed to three doesn't really bother me as I would tend not to expect more than a couple of years out of a HDD anyway.

greens are ok drive but they are made really to store videos and photos on, the difference between a black and a blue drive isnt actually that much anyway