Media Storage

[dupdeon]

Hi all

 

What is the most cost effective option to have when trying to store Media that does not use cloud based storage, also when looking for HDD can someone please explain what the deference is between Western Digital's RED, BLACK, BLUE and GREEN.

 

Thanks

[PlayStation 2]

WD Red drives are designed for NAS.

WD Blue drives are designed for casual machines.

WD Black drives are designed for specialized rigs.

WD Green drives are designed for home media servers or plain storage.

WD Purple drives are designed for home surveillance.

[Guest]

Blue = Normal day-to-day use

Red = NAS

Black = High performance but very loud

Green = Quiet but slow, best for storing a ton of data, but not for games and such

[kameshss]

WD Red drives are designed for NAS.

WD Blue drives are designed for casual machines.

WD Black drives are designed for specialized rigs.

WD Green drives are designed for home media servers or plain storage.

WD Purple drives are designed for home surveillance.

This ^^ 

 

@Captain_WD

[MrLigugu]

The WD blue is your best option in my opinion. It is the cheapest at the moment - (unless you would like more than 1TB)

[conspiravision]

WD Blue for sure, but don't go higher than 2Tb disks.

[Captain_WD]

Hi all

 

What is the most cost effective option to have when trying to store Media that does not use cloud based storage, also when looking for HDD can someone please explain what the deference is between Western Digital's RED, BLACK, BLUE and GREEN.

 

Thanks

 

Hey there dupdeon and welcome to the community  

 

It really depends on what Media you would like to store and what you would like to do with it (stream, record, simple storage, 24/7 access, etc.).

Regarding the drives: 

WD Blue is your regular everyday drive that 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. http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=ppTwE9

 

WD Green is your energy-efficient drive that works cool, quiet and saves a lot of power. It is designed for backups and secondary storage. Its features allow it to be a great choice for quiet backup builds or for archiving. It is mostly chosen for massive media storage (up to 6TB) in builds that have another drive for the OS and active programs and games. http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=ye0PZz

 

WD Black is the performance drive in WD's consumer line. It is the fastest among them 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. It has a llong, 5-year limited warranty and its mostly used in gaming computers or editing machines. http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=aHj7bH

 

WD Red is the NAS/RAID class drive from the consumer series that is designed specifically for RAID environments and NAS devices. It is tuned and optimized for 24/7 performance, RAID arrays and up to 8-bay NAS systems. This drive is often used for backups, stable secondary storage and in streaming builds, as well as NAS and RAID. http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=wosr3o

 

WD Purple is your surveillance-class drive, designed specifically for surveillance storage, video recording and streaming. It has optimized noise reduction (being the most quiet drive in the consumer line with only 22dBA nooise level during seeking time), significantly reduced frame loss nad optimized firmware. This drive is also used often for desktop computers due to its low noise levels. It has optimized sequential read/write speeds but the random read/write speeds are lower than normal and some people experience problems with it in regular desktops. http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=bvKjPK

 

WD VelociRaptor is a fast workstation drive, spinning at 10,000 rpm. It has limited capacity of 1TB and is mainly used in workstations for editing and content creation. People start to replace it with SSDs but still a lot of users prefer regular HDDs. http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=WqtrO6

 

WD AV is a drive that is designed specifically for 24/7 streaming and PVR, DVR and IPTV environments. It is an earlier version of the WD Purple and is still used for constant streaming in TVs, media players, etc. http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=ggfEby

 

For simple storage and streaming I would suggest to take a closer look at WD AV and WD Blue. WD Green can also be a good option, but it depends on the size of the files and the type of usage.

 

Thanks @kameshss for mentioning.

 

Captain_WD.

[dupdeon]

thanks a lot to all who submitted, got Green for mass storage and blue for regular content use.