I was on Western Digital's site looking at all of their models of hard drives. First there is the color coated series(blue, green, black, red, and purple) then the data center lineup(Se, Xe, and Re) the retail packages(I'm assuming re-branded drives for dummies) and the couple of oddballs(VelociRaptor, black², and av). Are some of these drive just re-branding of the same thing to sell more drives or same drive different firmware. Also could you do some drive performance/feature comparison. Not just WD but the other vendors as well. Some sort of hard drive battle royal in a makeshift wrestling arena.
Well they want to make money, so they have invested in specific areas that require hard drives and market them towards buys in those areas.
Blue: Consumer/Entry Drives
Black: Performance/Reliability Drives
Green: Energy efficient drives
Red: Dedicated NAS Drives
Purple: For surveillance systems
The VelociRaptors are probably there to hold the enthusiasts for when SSD were too exspensive. The Black² Drives are good for those that want an SSD and HDD for storage if they are limited to 1 drive cage in their laptops. I don't know anything about their Data Center Drives. There is a whole lot of areas to cover might as well cover as much as you can.
The data center drives have more strict validation and are designed to last a lot longer spinning 24/7, just like any other enterprise drive really
i would also like to add the warranty period is quite different for all those drivers. from one year on low end drives (green) to five years on high end drives (black, RE, etc).
also, if you read the specification and the technology that goes into every drive family on their site, youll find lot of differences.
- Blue- Your standard, average drive. Decent speed, decent reliability, decent price. Overall it's a good price to performance drive. 2 or 3 year warranty, depending
- Black- Your average 'gaming' mechanical hard drive. Faster than the blues, about as reliable, but more expensive. 5 year warranty.
- Green- "Eco-friendly" drive. Programmed to slow down if the data on it isn't actively being used (Intellipower), causing to to be fairly slow unless you're moving a lot of data around on it. 2 or 3 year warranty, depending
- Red- Designed for NAS and/or RAID systems. Similar programming to the Greens (Intellipower). 3 year warranty.
- Purple- Designed for surveillance systems. Similar programming to the Greens as well. 3 year warranty.
- Se- Server and data center drive. Potentially the same speed as the Blacks (1 TB flavour might be faster). 5 year warranty
- Re- Server and datacenter drive. Should be roughly the same speed as the Se and Black drives. 5 year warranty as well.
- Xe- Server and datacenter drive. SAS interface only from what I understand. Extremely fast for a mechanical hard drive (Faster than the Black/Re/Se drives). 5 year warranty.
- Velociraptor- High performance drive. Very fast, very expensive. Roughly as fast as the Xe drives, but using SATA interface. 5 year warranty.
There was a post asking essentially the same question literally two days ago.
It would still be nice to have a drive focused video. Some sort of performance comparison. Also when to use what kind of drives. ex Do i really need to use nas drives when using software raid(zfs). So long as I don't use greens I should be fine?