What is the difference between WD black and blue drives?

[PM97]

What is the difference between Western Digital Caviar Black and Blue drive? I know the black series is supposed to be more performance oriented but they have the same specs as each other. Same rpm, cache, capacity and the black is just more expensive.

[minibois]

What is the difference between Western Digital Caviar Black and Blue drive? I know the black series is supposed to be more performance oriented but they have the same specs as each other. Same rpm, cache, capacity and the black is just more expensive.

Black is suppose to be faster and more reliable, but I have yet to really find a benchmark that proves that.

Blue is just fine, as Black can be quite pricey

[GeeZillion]

What is the difference between Western Digital Caviar Black and Blue drive? I know the black series is supposed to be more performance oriented but they have the same specs as each other. Same rpm, cache, capacity and the black is just more expensive.

eh really in use they seem the same so the main difference you will notice is the price but black is suppose to be faster and not break as fast 

[Mighty_Miro_WD]

Hi there @PM97!

 

Both drives indeed have the same RPM, but they are meant for different purposes and have different build-in features.

 

WD Blue is designed for everyday usage and it is most commonly used for regular computing, light gaming and workloads and combined with SSD. It is fully capable to run most games as well as many programs for editing or programming, and it comes with capacity up to 1TB.

 

WD Black on the other hand is a performance oriented drive. It is the fastest among the WD consumer line and has good features such as a built-in dual-core CPU that makes the drive great for multitasking. It is designed for heavy gaming, big workloads and intensive file usage, and its mostly used in gaming computers or editing machines. It comes in bigger capacities compared to the Blue drive and has 5-year limited warranty and its mostly used in gaming computers or editing machines. 

 

Hope this helps.

 

Cheers!

[WereCat]

Blue are only in 1TB versions.

 

Black are suposed to be faster and more reliable but the fact that you can have 2x 1TB Blue vs 1x TB Black for the same price defeats the purpose of buying black since you can pick 2x1TB blue and put it into RAID 1 for a lot better reliability.

 

My 2 cents:

There is no reason at all to buy Black WD drives beside if you want higher capacity drives than 1TB because they you will be stuck with slow and unreliable Greens or NAS oriented Reds.

[PhantomWarz]

The Black series is typically more expensive due to its longer manufacturer warranty.

Spec for spec the drives will perform at a similar level. 

Black series drives used to also support WD TLER for better compatibility in hardware RAID arrays however this feature has been removed and is only available on the Red and Red Pro series of consumer drives. 

[PM97]

Thanks everyone for the great responses, I have been inactive as it was exam season.  @Mighty_Miro_WD. Thanks for the great detail. I guess I will really have to think about which drive to go for.