Western Digital is a hard drive manufacturer working on hard drives for quite sometime. The company has been manufacturing multiple nature of hard drives to cater to the masses. It has manufactured special hard drives for gaming enthusiasts, servers, and even a breed for the Eco-friendly information seekers.

Let’s get into greater detail and see the major differences of all Western Digital hard drives.

Below we have explained what Western Digital hard drive colors actually mean.

1. Western Digital Green Hard Drives

Usage: Archival purpose in Data centers

Green is the color of nature but that is an obvious fact. WD named its drive ‘green’ because of the same reason. The drives are quieter and save more energy – in abidance with the ECO-friendly rules.

Advantages of Western Digital Green Hard Drives

• Much Quieter
• Energy Savers
• External Hard drives
• Intellipower spin speed

These green hard drives are specifically made for people who are energy conscious. Though, in comparison with other drives, Green Hard drives are more costly and have a lower RPM (fetching speed).

Specs of Green Western Digital Hard Drives:

• RPM: 5400RPM – 5900RPM
• Interface: SATA III
• Cache: 64MB
• Warranty: 2 years
• Capacity: 500GB to 6TB

WD Green’s disadvantages are:

• Lower RPM
• Low reliability
• Low Seek times

These drives are not the fastest. They are used as an external hard drive due to their slow speed. Mostly used in laptops because of light weight and low energy consumption, thus increasing the battery time of laptops.

2. Western Digital Blue Hard Drives

Usage: In Desktop and laptop computers

Western Digital Blue hard drives are the preferred choice of majority of the consumers. These are the primary hard drives for home desktop and laptop computers. Blue drives are considered more reliable as they are compatible with almost all type of computer systems. These drives are budget friendly as well. Even industrial applications utilize WD Blue hard drives due to their increased rotational speed of 7200RPM and a lower cost.

Advantages of WD Blue:

• Faster Speed
• Higher Density

Specs of Blue Western Digital Hard Drives:

• RPM: 7200RPM
• Interface: SATA III
• Cache: 8MB to 64MB
• Warranty: 2 years
• Capacity: 80GB to 1TB

WD Blue’s disadvantages are:

• Less Warranty
• 1TB Capacity at Max

Uses of WD Blue Hard Drives:

WD Blue hard drives are used for everyday tasks. Especially to play games, record videos and all the arduous tasks that require higher density.  Generally speaking, it is low-cost and can be used as a backup disk or internal hard drive if needed. Due to their higher density, travel requirements are minimized and seek times are reduced.

Many HD reviewers encourage a hard drive of atleast 7200RPM if an solid state drive is not present.

3. Western Digital Black Hard Drives

Usage: In High-performance computers, specifically by gamers, video editors, developers/designers

The performance industry calls Western Digital Black hard drive as the flagship device. These drives, though faster, are heavier on the pockets due to their cost. These flagship devices utilize an 800GB platter and are known among enthusiasts for higher reliability ratio and impressive endurance.

Operating at the same RPM as WD Blue, these hard drives can go as far as 4TB capacity – considered the biggest advantage over WD Blue disk drive. Moreover, in order to control the vibration, the WD Black hard drives utilize a beefier chassis that controls high-speed and odd mounting orientation, thus reducing read & write errors.

In comparison with WD Blue, the only difference to naked eyes is the 5-year warranty and the enhanced storage limit. Tempted users can get a > 2TB WD Storage, for high-performance computing.

Advantages of WD Black:

• Faster
• High Endurance
• Durable

WD Black’s disadvantages are:

• Significantly noisier than WD Green and Blue.
• Expensive per GB.

Specs of Green Western Digital Hard Drives

• A 5-year warranty.
• Storage limit <= 4TB
• 7200RPM
• Improved endurance

4. Western Digital Red Hard Drives

Usage: In Servers and Small office networks

The last color in Western Digital Hard drive series is Red. Red hard drives are specifically built with small and business customers in mind. These small storage pieces are engineered to handle increased workload for business, home entertainment channels and even servers. Due to their stature, these devices carry a 5-year limited warranty.

 

Red hard drives can also support RAID architecture. That is, if a set of hard drives go down, the second RAID partition can carry with the work. This is one reason why Red Western Digital Hard Drives can remain operational at all times.

Optimal temperature for RAID hard drives is in between 30C to 40C.

Advantages of using WD Red hard drives:

• Network Attached Storage
• Remote Access
• RAID
• Always On

Specs of Red Western Digital Hard Drives

• 16MB to 64MB Cache
• 3 year warranty
• Intellipower spin
• Built for Servers

WD Red’s disadvantages are:

• Need temperature normalizers
• Pricier for Small Networks

Here is a video describing more details of WD hard drives.