WD Hard Drive Color Differences - Blue, Green, Black, Red, Purple

When selecting the HDDs for surveillance video storage or desktop PC, we will choose the products from Seagate or Western Digital. In order to simplify the selection, Western Digital’s hard disc drives are categorized by the product’s features, also using different colors to mark. 

Currently, the WD has Green HDD/Blue HDD/Black HDD/Red HDD/Purple HDD, also the Enterprise grade HDD. Each of color can represent  the application that HDD fits.

WD HDD Color Differences - Blue, Green, Black, Red, Purple:

Green HDD: low noise, suitable for home usage,  HDD for file downloading, its advantages including lower heat, more quiet, more eco-friendly. Energy-friendly HDD, large capacity storage; adopting IntelliPower technology, the speed can automatically adjust between 5400-7200 rpm. Pros: quiet, low-cost; Cons: low performance, high-delay time, average life expectancy.

Blue HDD: suitable for home usage, high performance and low-cost advantages, 7200 rpm; the disadvantages include the running noise is a bit higher than Green HDD, performance is lower than Black HDD.

Black HDD: High performance, large cache, high-speed. Lias: LS WD Caviar Black. Mainly suitable for enterprise applications that requiring high-end computing such as video/photo editing/rendering and high performance game console, or servers.

Red HDD: Specifically designed for NAS environment that requiring 7days 24 hours continuous working. Western Digital Red HDD are mainly used in 1 to 5 HDDs small and medium scale NAS residential and small enterprise users. Red HDD’s performance is close to the Green HDD, power consumption is low, low noise, can be suitable for continuous working, featuring NASware technology, this technology offers better compatibility, can fit NAS or RAID seamlessly.

Purple HDD: Green HDD AV-GP’s replicate, support ignore cyclic redundancy check (CRC) errors, suitable for video surveillance storage, 24*7 continuous working design.

Additionally, there are Enterprise grade HDDs offer the maximum performance, super large cache, high-speed. Enterprise grade HDDs also has the 7*24 hours continuous working capability, compared with traditional HDDs, offering high reliability and long life expectancy, also the highest Mean Time Before Failure (MTBF) are main differences.

In conclusion, Green and Blue HDDs are suitable for desktop PC, generally the Blue HDD’s read/write speed is faster than Green HDD, so many users choose the Blue HDDs for their PCs, while Black HDDs are widely used in servers. The Red HDD is specifically designed for the NAS, Purple HDDs are suitable for video surveillance system, can support up to 32-channel HD security cameras.