What Do the Western Digital HDD Colors Mean?
Western Digital HDD has six colors that include green, purple, blue, gold, and black. What do the WD hard drives colors mean? Well, the differences are simple to understand and we’ll walk you through everything right here. It will only take a few minutes!
The WD colors are made for several purposes and it’s important to choose what suits your needs. Almost any of the Western Digital HDD colors will work for you and your computer. You just need to know how to find the best one for what you intend to use it for. We’ll guide you on each of the colors and tell you what their best use is below.
WD Blue
The WD HDD Blue is very reliable and is available as an internal HDD or as an SSD. Blue is made for general use; for people that use their computers every day for activities like work, internet browsing, and casual gaming. The capacities of Western Digital HDD Blue range from 250GB to 6TB.
The revolution per minute varies from one model to another; there are models that have 5400 rpm and others that have 7200 rpm. WD Blue is suitable for storing anything that one needs including music, games, and pictures.
No products found.
WD Green
WD Green performed a similar role as WD Blue – so much so that they started to merge the two lines a few years ago – and people tended to prefer the Blue model.
Western Digital stopped manufacturing the original WD Green a while back and replaced it with a SATA SDD. You can no longer get Green as an HDD.
No products found.
WD Black
WD Black offers maximum performance because of the capacity of its drive. They have 1 TB external hard drives that go all the way up to 6 TB for those that need even more storage.
WD Black is suitable for PCs that are used in a workstation or for gamers because their performance and usability are very high. The cache of WD Black is 128MB compared to WD Blue that has a 64MB cache. Because of that, this particular external gaming hard drive is a big favorite.
All models of WD Black versions have a five-year warranty and 7200rpm. This is a high-performance HDD and, whilst it is available as an SSD, the majority of people buy Western Digital Black for an internal hard drive, or as an external HDD.
No products found.
No products found.
WD Red
WD Red and WD Red Pro are designed to be slotted inside the Network Assisted Storage (NAS). WD Red is only compatible with the NAS systems.
The capacities of the WD Red range from 1TB to a massive 14TB. They also get support from the RAID configuration.
The WD Reds excel more when used in reading performance than the write performance. Red can be picked up as an SSD, but people mainly opt for the HDD versions as it’s designed primarily to be a high performing NAS storage solution. This helps to increase efficiency and productivity in business computer systems.
No products found.
WD Purple
WD Purple is the best surveillance drive for CCTV systems at home or in business workplaces. The Purple HDD color from WD can sustain its performance 24/7 and is capable of supporting up to 64 HD cameras at the same time.
It is mainly used by security systems to record and store videos. It is the exact opposite of WD Red because it excels well in writing performance than reading performance. WD Purple utilizes a technology called ALLFRAME that helps in minimizing errors while recording and saving videos. The storage capacities range from 1TB to 14TB.
Purple is also available as SD & microSD cards for on-the-go surveillance like dash cams, body cams, drones, and more.
No products found.
WD Gold
WD Gold is mainly used in enterprise-class storage systems and data centres. It often works well when used in servers, and can handle a lot of sophisticated systems simultaneously. This is the most expensive color HDD from WD (per terabyte) and is available from 1TB to 18TB.
This HDD color is one of the most reliable HDDs in the world; it can handle a staggering 2.5 million hours MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures).
WD Gold features technology such as a multi-axis shock sensor, stable trac, and dynamic fly height. It comes with a warranty of five years.
No products found.
Conclusion
All Western Digital HDD colors provide solutions regardless of whether the user needs extra performance, servers, reliability, or capacity.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re running a gaming computer, home security systems, work surveillance, or even enterprise-level servers, there is a color suited for every use case. Users can figure out what exactly they need using the color-coding (and our explanations of them all in this post).
WD Blue and Green are used for the general purposes of storage, with Blue being slightly more reliable and Green being more eco-friendly.
WD Black is for pure performance in media, gaming, and content creation.
WD Red is for network-assisted storage. It is designed for (and only compatible with) NAS systems.
WD Purple is advised for users who require continuous operation, such as surveillance, and can support the use of many cameras at the same time.
WD Gold is the premium of the WD HDD colors. It is made for data center services to allow multiple users to use the network at the same time and be able to read the data that appears on it.
Users should keep in mind that the speed of 7200rpm or higher is essential if they need high performance at all times.
With long-lasting warranties, you don’t need to worry about a WD hard drive failing to work – but with their high scoring customer reviews, that appears to be a low risk anyway.