WD Blue and black significant differences?

[Allen_Prasetya]

As the title goes, I'm planning to buy new HDD and does the differences between both of them really significant in terms of performance and reliability? or any other scope, I know I should go for SSD for performance but I'm opting for storage capacity for now, and the budget don't allow me for SSD. Or is there any other suggestion for good hdd?, thanks in advance

[gipsy]

in one of my laptops replaced DVDrom to optibay with WD black 7200,pretty fast one .about a reliability -it hv 5 years of warranty here but WD blue- only 2  ,so difference is  obvious for me .

 

[vibranium]

It is hard to suggest anything definite because the availability and warranty terms may be different in your country.

 

You will get better advice by asking experienced computer users in your area.

[Holmes]

True vibranium this website says additional information:

 

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/298091-32-cavair-green-blue-black-difference

 

This is a excerpt:

 

Greens are for eco-oriented folks who want less power consumption
Blues are your standard vanilla drives
Reds are performance oriented drives that spin at variable rates
Blacks are for enthusiasts willing to shell out a premium

 

This is a better excerpt:

 

I've used all varieties of WD drive now so I thought I'd give some of my experience, as this topic comes up in quite a few searches on this subject.

WD Blue
These are your baseline drives; typical power consumption, solid performance, good price. If none of the specific features of the other types stand out then these are the ones you want, they're ideal as capacity drives for a desktop for example.

WD Green
These are all about saving energy; they're not actually all that slow in practice for things like streaming, but for more random read/write they lag behind a bit, again not by all that much. The main benefit is that they save power and wear by spinning down when they can, this means they're basically best for things like backup drives which are only in use periodically (e.g - once an hour), if they're made to spin up too often then you obliterate any potential savings you could make, at which point you've got a slightly slower Blue.

WD Black
These are pure performance drives, all about speed. Their top speed for streaming isn't that much further ahead than a blue drive, but the main difference comes from it being generally more responsive. Basically if all you want is speed, but you can't afford an SSD with the capacity you need, then WD Blacks are for you. A good value gaming system can do well with an affordable SSD for OS and a few other bits and pieces you can fit, with a WD Black as your main drive for your games, for example by moving your Steam folder onto it, giving you good all round performance and capacity.
They also now have generous warranties (5 years), they're basically WD Red+, if you can take advantage of the extra performance that is.

WD Red
I think of these as a hybrid between Greens and Blacks; their power consumption is really good, but unlike the Green which is designed to save power between uses, the Reds are designed to just spin constantly for continual use/availability. They're quiet, responsive, and have good speeds, but most importantly they have an extended (3 year) warranty.
You could use them as system drives and they'd perform just fine, but you probably wouldn't be getting the most of their cost; they're ideal for often used NAS devices, I also like them for RAID setups, particular RAID-5 and RAID-6 since a bunch of them doesn't use tons of power, but they're responsive enough to handle the distributed blocks of data, parity writes etc.


So to summarise:
WD Black = Speed/high end use, extended warranty.
WD Blue = General use.
WD Green = Energy saving for backups or other less frequent use.
WD Red = Some energy saving, continual use, extended warranty, ideal for RAID.

Not to say that you can't use them for different things, ultimately they're still all HDDs with good streaming speed etc. and they're close enough that for general use I doubt you'd notice the difference. But basically if you don't need the extra features of the Red and Black then you're wasting money, and you're probably wasting a Green if you don't let it spin down. The prices can vary rapidly though, so sometimes it's worth waiting a while to see if you can a Black or Red at a reduced price (I got some a little while ago for a NAS at only about £5 extra per drive over Greens!).

 

Thats just from a simple google search and they are accurate.  I know from experience that green is eco friendly and black is performance.  I know he asked about blue and black hard drives I included greens and red's just in case.

[player]

beware of WD Green rebranded as WD Blue

[jabrwky]

My personal preferences: Samsung SSD, and Hitachi Deskstar for userfiles & storage. http://www.storagereview.com/hitachi_deskstar_7k4000_review

 

[macnavarra]

You should go for a hybrid HDD same performance of a 7200 rpm drive and reliability of a 5400rpm drive in my opinion.

 

[pc71520]

WD Black, here. 

[Holmes]

Western Digital Red's are like a hybrid of the green's and blacks according to the user in the article you mentioned a hybrid of speed and reliability not hybrid of energy savings and reliability.

[Allen_Prasetya]

Oohhh thanks for all the replies guys, forgot to turn on the reply notification
 

22 hours ago, vibranium said:

It is hard to suggest anything definite because the availability and warranty terms may be different in your country.

 

You will get better advice by asking experienced computer users in your area.

Yea I agree with you too, WD in here kinda hard, most of the shops were selling seagate, but I already have enough of seagate because bought it 4 times, 3 of them died, and this last one is dying too, I don't know whether its my bad luck with seagate or just the quality in these last year were dropping

 

22 hours ago, Holmes said:

True vibranium this website says additional information:

 

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/298091-32-cavair-green-blue-black-difference

 

This is a excerpt:

 

Greens are for eco-oriented folks who want less power consumption
Blues are your standard vanilla drives
Reds are performance oriented drives that spin at variable rates
Blacks are for enthusiasts willing to shell out a premium

 

This is a better excerpt:

 

I've used all varieties of WD drive now so I thought I'd give some of my experience, as this topic comes up in quite a few searches on this subject.

WD Blue
These are your baseline drives; typical power consumption, solid performance, good price. If none of the specific features of the other types stand out then these are the ones you want, they're ideal as capacity drives for a desktop for example.

WD Green
These are all about saving energy; they're not actually all that slow in practice for things like streaming, but for more random read/write they lag behind a bit, again not by all that much. The main benefit is that they save power and wear by spinning down when they can, this means they're basically best for things like backup drives which are only in use periodically (e.g - once an hour), if they're made to spin up too often then you obliterate any potential savings you could make, at which point you've got a slightly slower Blue.

WD Black
These are pure performance drives, all about speed. Their top speed for streaming isn't that much further ahead than a blue drive, but the main difference comes from it being generally more responsive. Basically if all you want is speed, but you can't afford an SSD with the capacity you need, then WD Blacks are for you. A good value gaming system can do well with an affordable SSD for OS and a few other bits and pieces you can fit, with a WD Black as your main drive for your games, for example by moving your Steam folder onto it, giving you good all round performance and capacity.
They also now have generous warranties (5 years), they're basically WD Red+, if you can take advantage of the extra performance that is.

WD Red
I think of these as a hybrid between Greens and Blacks; their power consumption is really good, but unlike the Green which is designed to save power between uses, the Reds are designed to just spin constantly for continual use/availability. They're quiet, responsive, and have good speeds, but most importantly they have an extended (3 year) warranty.
You could use them as system drives and they'd perform just fine, but you probably wouldn't be getting the most of their cost; they're ideal for often used NAS devices, I also like them for RAID setups, particular RAID-5 and RAID-6 since a bunch of them doesn't use tons of power, but they're responsive enough to handle the distributed blocks of data, parity writes etc.


So to summarise:
WD Black = Speed/high end use, extended warranty.
WD Blue = General use.
WD Green = Energy saving for backups or other less frequent use.
WD Red = Some energy saving, continual use, extended warranty, ideal for RAID.

Not to say that you can't use them for different things, ultimately they're still all HDDs with good streaming speed etc. and they're close enough that for general use I doubt you'd notice the difference. But basically if you don't need the extra features of the Red and Black then you're wasting money, and you're probably wasting a Green if you don't let it spin down. The prices can vary rapidly though, so sometimes it's worth waiting a while to see if you can a Black or Red at a reduced price (I got some a little while ago for a NAS at only about £5 extra per drive over Greens!).

 

Thats just from a simple google search and they are accurate.  I know from experience that green is eco friendly and black is performance.  I know he asked about blue and black hard drives I included greens and red's just in case.

Really clear things up about the differences holmes thanks!, well yea actually already done some googling but just wanted to know people opinion here about the hdd, especially people that using it

6 hours ago, macnavarra said:

You should go for a hybrid HDD same performance of a 7200 rpm drive and reliability of a 5400rpm drive in my opinion.

 

SSHD eh, I'm still not convinced of it for now, since most of the data still stored on the platter so the performance different... maybe a little big but not worth it?

[straycat19]

I have over 50 WD REDs but they are all in NAS units, which is what they are designed for.  I always use SSDs for my Primary drive and WD Blacks for Storage drives.  In laptops I use an SSD and replace the DVD with a hard drive, either WD Blue or Seagate.  I have old drives, both WD and Seagate, that still run and are over 18 years old.  I think it is just a matter of luck on how long a drive will last, though I learned a long time ago to stay away from WD Green drives, they just didn't last.

[vibranium]

1 hour ago, Allen_Prasetya said:

Yea I agree with you too, WD in here kinda hard, most of the shops were selling seagate, but I already have enough of seagate because bought it 4 times, 3 of them died, and this last one is dying too, I don't know whether its my bad luck with seagate or just the quality in these last year were dropping

 

 

1. If you buy WD, you may have problems returning for repairs. Check first before buying.

2. If all your drives are Seagate and all your drives are failing, maybe there are problems with heat or electricity supply.

[truemate]

use anything.. blue black green red blah blah colors

 

some says black is good.. 2 times mine 1tb wd got crash within 4 months.. both where black... blue worked fine for me.

but presently using 500gb wd black got it replacement from the crashed one.. and it working from 2 yrs

 

i think 1tb hdd SUCKS they have more chance of getting crash then less space hdd

500mb r best and safe...

 

abt seagate,, dont ever buy it.. they r the most worst hdd i ever seen... their so called barracuda 1tb hdd never stand for 1 month..

One small short circuit.. and their hdd failed.

 

[DKT27]

2 hours ago, truemate said:

use anything.. blue black green red blah blah colors

 

some says black is good.. 2 times mine 1tb wd got crash within 4 months.. both where black... blue worked fine for me.

but presently using 500gb wd black got it replacement from the crashed one.. and it working from 2 yrs

 

i think 1tb hdd SUCKS they have more chance of getting crash then less space hdd

500mb r best and safe...

 

abt seagate,, dont ever buy it.. they r the most worst hdd i ever seen... their so called barracuda 1tb hdd never stand for 1 month..

One small short circuit.. and their hdd failed.

 

 

Here, we had a certain model, or maybe that model is same worldwide, of the WD Black, which were known to have problems like drive failing, bad sectors and such.

[lurch234]

On 2016-06-07 at 6:59 AM, truemate said:

2 times mine 1tb wd got crash within 4 months.. both where black... blue worked fine for me.

but presently using 500gb wd black got it replacement from the crashed one.. and it working from 2 yrs

 

i think 1tb hdd SUCKS they have more chance of getting crash then less space hdd

500mb r best and safe...

 

Its sad to hear about this. It would seem that I'm a lucky one than. My 1TB wd black is 5 yrs old now and according to Hard Disk Sentinel Pro it has more then 918 days left to go

[vibranium]

Different countries and markets could get different batches of the same model harddisk. So the performance and reliability may not be all the same.

[Sylence]

the best of them is WD RE edition, even more reliable and faster than WD Black edition, subsequently more expensive 

[truemate]

18 hours ago, lurch234 said:

 

Its sad to hear about this. It would seem that I'm a lucky one than. My wd black is 5 yrs old now and according to Hard Disk Sentinel Pro it has more then 918 days left to go

 

u very lucky..... is this 500gb or 1tb hdd ?

[truemate]

19 hours ago, DKT27 said:

 

Here, we had a certain model, or maybe that model is same worldwide, of the WD Black, which were known to have problems like drive failing, bad sectors and such.

all models r ok I think if they r 500gb.. those 1TB r very risky.. I have a WD black 1tb drive,, I hardly use it for few days and it got some 2 bad sectors.... I removed it and kept it for backup only.... as said presently on 500gb wd black and it working nicely < touchwood> .. mine 8yrs hitachi 150gb drive also there ,, still it is fit and without any bad sectors.. though I don't use it now... kept aside for emergency lol.

 

[lurch234]

4 hours ago, truemate said:

u very lucky..... is this 500gb or 1tb hdd ?

 

1TB. Sorry, should have mentioned that

[DKT27]

4 hours ago, truemate said:

all models r ok I think if they r 500gb.. those 1TB r very risky.. I have a WD black 1tb drive,, I hardly use it for few days and it got some 2 bad sectors.... I removed it and kept it for backup only.... as said presently on 500gb wd black and it working nicely < touchwood> .. mine 8yrs hitachi 150gb drive also there ,, still it is fit and without any bad sectors.. though I don't use it now... kept aside for emergency lol.

 

 

As I said, a specific model of 1TB or 2TB had big problems. You could have replaced the drive as soon as you found problems on it.

 

Hitachi and Toshiba, unfortunately, do not sell here. As in, Hitachi is not easily available for desktop and Toshiba has no warranty for consumers and such.

[Rivenson]

Quote

the best of them is WD RE edition, even more reliable and faster than WD Black edition, subsequently more expensive

 That's true.

 

We use WD's HDD's, (RE2 , RE3 , and Velociraptors) in 5 PC's (most of them operates 24*7)

In 7 years never had any failure, not even 1 bad block, but i must say that all PC's are behind UPS's and are cooled efficiently (which is somewhat important)

 

After 15 years of experience, I have found that WD's and Hitachi HDD's are most reliable.

 

 

[truemate]

14 hours ago, Rivenson said:

 

After 15 years of experience, I have found that WD's and Hitachi HDD's are most reliable.

 

 

 

That's true.

[J.D]

For general use I use WD blue, 1TB, this drive is 4 years old, never a problem . 

 

Manufacturer    Western Digital
Hard Disk Family    Caviar Blue
Form Factor    3.5"
Formatted Capacity    1 TB
Rotational Speed    7200 RPM
Max. Internal Data Rate    1200 Mbit/s
Interface    SATA-III
Buffer-to-Host Data Rate    600 MB/s
Buffer Size    64 MB

 

 

[Allen_Prasetya]

Well after considering the options and some feedback from you guys I've decided to give the WD black a go, maybe i'm gonna try the red one in the near future, and hitachi too since its reliable from various source and from here, thanks for all the replies guys, really appreciate it!