Hard Drive Categories and Western Digital HDD Colors

2021-08-19


(2021 Aug Updated) The topic of distinguishing hard disk types is a bit "big", here we can only make a brief distinction.

Let's first ask a few questions: Is the hard disk in an common computer the same as the hard disk in the security surveillance system? What do the colors of Western Digital hard drives mean?

Many people think that new hard drives such as SSDs will replace traditional mechanical hard drives, but they are actually not as early as we thought. And with the improvement of various technologies of mechanical hard drives, mechanical hard drives are still our main configuration on computers and various types of data storage.

The SSD is different from the mechanical hard drive we are talking about, so we will not involve SSD here.

Western Digital produced different HDD categories using different colors: Blue, Green, Black, Red, Purple and Golden.

Blue Color:

Desktop and Mobile Category. Blue HDD is the main hard disk for common computers, it is especially suitable for data access in home computers

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Green Color:

No more available. The green HDD used to be a choice for common computers too, but it just do not have the same performance as the blud HDD. But green HDD is the main energy saving and low power consumption. WD officially classified the green disk as the blue disk and it was merged into the blud HDD line;

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Black Color:

Black HDD is also used on common computers and is characterized by high performance compared to blue disks. The price is more expensive than the blue HDD;

It is often adopted by consumers who have higher requirements for data access speed and performance, such as setting up a home server, or editing multimedia videos and photos; Some enthusiast gamers also like the black HDD;

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Red Color:

WD Red HDD is NAS HDD. Red NAS HDD is designed specifically for NAS systems. It can have 7 x 24 operation and reliability.

The performance of the red disk are similar to the green disks, with low power consumption, low noise, and being able to adapt to long-term continuous work.

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Golden Color:

Enterprise level category. It is designed for enterprise specially. Golden HDD provides best performance. It can have 7 x 24 operation and data saving reliability like red HDD, but golden HDD can be better reliability with longer MTBF(Mean Time Before Failure). Of course, it is more expensive.

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Purple Color:

Surveillance Category. Purple HDD could run 7 x 24 too. But maybe the data failure handling is different with other HDD such as red HDD. Red HDD needs more data reliability, but Surveillance system allows slight data error.

For example, when we watch TV, we can ignore a little bit video breaking but just skip to next section which is for more smooth video playing.

However, the advantage of the purple disk is that it can also work 24 hours a day, but it has the best adaptability to the environment. For example, outdoor temperature difference, dusty places and so on.

From the design of the purple HDD, we cannot use the purple disk as a NAS disk.

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Where to Buy:

or Local store such as BestBuy, Canada Computers.

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