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Western Digital Hard Drives Explained

By June 20, 2014No Comments

If you’re familiar with Western Digital’s products, you’ll notice that they are sold in many different colours. Below is a brief description of each to help you identify which drive would be suitable to you.

 

WD - BlueBlue: These are your regular desktop and notebook hard drives, spinning at what is considered “normal” speeds for those applications, which means 5400RPM for notebook drives and 7200RPM for desktop drives. They will be found in everyday PCs and notebooks, and offer a good combination of speed and capacities of between 500GB and 4TB.

 

WD - GreenGreen: These are Western Digital’s eco-friendly drives. They offer capacities of between 500GB and 4TB, but they have been designed to use less power, which means they are not as fast as Blue drives. These are the drives to go for when capacity and power-efficiency are more important than speed.

 

WD - BlackBlack: Any drive in the Black series is designed for performance. If you are a gamer and you want your operating system to boot faster, or you want games to load faster, you’ll want a Black drive. You’ll find Black drives cover everything from fast desktop drives to solid-state disks to Western Digital’s brand-new Dual Drive technology that has an SSD and a regular hard drive bundled together into a single 9mm enclosure. You’ll also find Western Digital’s 10,000RPM VelociRaptor drives in this category.

 

WD - RedRed: This one is relatively new, it encompasses drives that are designed for use in Network Attached Storage (NAS) setups. They’re specifically designed to be on and working 24/7, which other drives aren’t, and of course they support capacities of up to 4TB. If you are running a multi-drive NAS device, these are the drives to populate its bays with.

 


WD - Purple 2Purple
: This is the newest category, introduced February, 2014. Purple represents drives that have been purpose-built to work in surveillance solutions that record footage to hard drives 24/7, and as such they have been designed to withstand incredible heat, they’re quieter than the average desktop hard drive and they feature very fast write speeds that can handle up to 32 simultaneous HD camera feeds at once.

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