Western Digital Colors

[Sir Launcelot]

whats the deal with the western digital color coding, are there specific purpose to it?

do this mean some color are better for the others, like caviar blue is better than black?

what is the difference of these color coded hdd to others like toshiba and seagate?

 

[Guest]

Here you go:

 

[ARikozuM]

Pick your favorite color and go for Blue.

 

Edit: Should probably add a /s...

Every color has a use-case to choose from. These days see very little gain from rotation speed and more from density and read heads.

[Enderman]

Or you could also go to the website and read the big bold title under each product.

https://www.wdc.com/products/internal-storage.html

[PianoPlayer88Key]

I have some older WD Green drives, a WD Black and a WD Blue (which I thought was a black but plugging in its model number in google indicates it's a blue), along with a couple pre-color WD Caviar drives.  If I was buying some new WD drives today, I'd probably be getting Reds most likely, or if the budget permitted, Gold, for my use.

[seagate_surfer]

13 hours ago, Sir Launcelot said:

what is the difference of these color coded hdd to others like toshiba and seagate?

As far as Seagate's lineup goes, we have 3 main categories of internal consumer drives based on what environment they are ideal for:

- BarraCuda is your standard desktop grade drive with a 2 year warranty, rated for 8 hours a day x 5 days a week use and up to 55TB of data per year. BarraCuda Pro is a beefier version with all 7200 RPM (Revolutions Per Minute) speeds, 300TB of data per year rating and a 5 year warranty, plus the larger capacities have a larger cache as well.

(We also have a sort of sub-category here called FireCuda, which is a Solid-State Hybrid Drive that has an SSD cache on      which the drive intuitively places your most frequently accessed data for faster load-time performance, then also has a larger traditional spinning storage capacity for the rest of your data as well. The FireCuda comes with a 5 year warranty.)

- IronWolf is a NAS drive, has a 3 year warranty. Ideal for enclosures with large amounts of drives and/or servers. Rated for 24x7 use, up to 180TB of data per year, firmware engineered to excel in RAID and protect against performance & longevity issues from high vibration environments. The larger capacities have built in RV (Rotational Vibration) sensors as well. The IronWolf Pro ups to a 5 year warranty, 300TB of data per year workload rating, 2 free years of Rescue Services, 7200 RPM and RV sensors in all capacities.

- SkyHawk is for surveillance. DVRs, CCTV, NVRs, things of that nature where the drive is going to be writing roughly 90% of the time and playing back or reading the other 10%. The firmware prioritizes the massive blocks of highly detailed video data as it comes in, in order to better protect the quality of the video as well as protect against frame drops. They come with a 3 year warranty and up to 180TB of data per year workload rating. We have recently rolled out a SkyHawk AI drive as well designed to be more robust for uses like machine/deep learning, with a much higher MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) rating of 2 million hours, 5 year warranty, 2 free years of rescue services, and RV sensors.

If you'd like to check it out, here is a video on choosing the right drive for the right job.