**Western Digital Drive Options: Understanding the Differences**

When it comes to choosing a primary drive, one of the most important decisions is whether to go with a Western Digital (WD) blue, black, or green drive. While WD offers several options, there are key differences between each model that can impact performance and lifespan.

**Density and Speed: The Key to Performance**

One of the main differences between WD blue and black drives is density. WD blue drives have a higher density than black drives, meaning they're actually faster in many cases. Specifically, WD blue drives have a one terabyte per platter density, which allows for more data storage on a single platter. In contrast, WD black drives have about 800 gigabytes of platter density, requiring more platters to store the same amount of data.

This difference in density affects performance because when you pack more data into a smaller space, the drive's header has less room to move physically when accessing data. As a result, blue drives are often slightly faster than black drives due to this increased efficiency. Both blue and black drives spin at 7200 rpm, as well as having about 64 megabytes of cache. However, the key difference lies in their density and capacity.

**Capacity and Availability**

Another important factor to consider is capacity and availability. WD blue drives only come in one terabyte (TB) capacity, which is its maximum size. In contrast, black drives are available in capacities ranging from 1 TB to 4 TB. Green drives, on the other hand, offer up to 6 TB of storage. While this means more options for users with larger storage needs, it also increases costs.

For a primary drive, blue and black drives are often considered interchangeable options, as both can provide excellent performance and durability. However, if you're looking at capacities beyond one terabyte, black drives become the better choice due to their higher density and increased storage capacity.

**Durability and Vibration Resistance**

Black drives also offer several advantages in terms of durability and vibration resistance. These drives have a beefier chassis that allows them to withstand higher levels of vibration, making them ideal for high-performance machines with fast fans or those mounted differently than usual (e.g., vertically). This added stability reduces the likelihood of data corruption due to vibrations during access, extending the drive's lifespan.

In contrast, WD blue drives are more suited for users who don't require such advanced features. While they still offer excellent performance and durability, their reduced vibration resistance means they may not be suitable for all applications.

**Price Point**

The price point is another crucial factor to consider when choosing between WD blue, black, or green drives. WD blue drives start at around $53 for a 1 TB model, making them an attractive option for users with smaller storage needs. In contrast, black drives are priced higher due to their increased capacity and durability features, with prices starting at around $120.

Ultimately, the choice between WD blue, black, or green drives comes down to budget and specific needs. For archival storage or large media files, a 2 TB green drive may be an excellent option. For primary drives in gaming machines, a 1 TB WD blue drive is likely sufficient and cost-effective.

**Conclusion**

In conclusion, while there are differences between WD blue, black, and green drives, the key factors to consider are density, speed, capacity, availability, durability, vibration resistance, and price point. By understanding these factors, users can make informed decisions about which drive best suits their needs and budget. Whether you're building a gaming machine or require high-performance storage for your primary drive, WD offers excellent options that cater to different use cases and requirements.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everyone this is Steve from gamers Nexus tonight and today we're talking about hard drives specifically Western Digital naming convention Seagate has its own name you can mention Hitachi which is owned by WD has its own naming convention but today we're just focused on Western Digital because they use colors which don't necessarily mean a whole lot so their colors are for what we're concerned about green blue and black now there's also red but red is meant for raid usage and network-attached storage raid so we're going to ignore that for today and just focus on the consumer base the desktop drives which would be green blue black online you'll find a lot of forums users and other people generally saying that it's good better best green being the low end blue mid-range and black being high performs so it's not really as easy as just buying one based on the performance you want because they might not do exactly what you want with hard drives there are a few specs that we care about the most there's rpm which is the revolutions per minute that the physical disk the platter spins at there is cache which really after 64 megabytes becomes largely irrelevant for hard drives and then there's capacity and as a result of capacity or leading into capacity is density and both of those are very important as well so at WD green you get higher capacities and you get lower rpms but this means that it's got a lower TDP lore watt requirement or power requirement it's been slower but that means it's quieter so there are different trade-offs this means that you don't want to use WD green for things like a primary drive where your operating system would reside and you really don't want to use it for gaming because it spins up slower it only spins at 54 to 59 hundred rpm it's got a variable rpm so it spins up and down based on the load requirement but that's not fifty nine hundreds pretty slow you want generally 7200 rpm if you're not using an SSD so that means that WD green makes the most sense for archival storage for things like movies photos and music that aren't being accessed constantly and when they are accessed they can be slower in delivery because they're not as high bitrate or high bitrate requirements and i/o requirements as things like the operating system which has a very high i/o requirement or games which have high i/o requirements WD greens had a rocky start in that a lot of them had because they were having to seek errors when the RPM changed this has been mostly resolved in the newer version of the WD green drives but there's still really specific use case scenarios you don't want them for your primary drive so what do you want for your primary drive it's either going to be blue or black if you're looking at Western Digital and the difference between the two is actually not as big as some people might think or lead you to believe first of all WD blues have a higher density than the black drives which means that they're actually faster in a lot of cases depending on which one you buy from each brand and WD blue has a one terabyte per platter density that means it can store a full terabyte of data on a single platter that's the spinning disk whereas the WD black drives have about 800 gigabytes for platter density so you'll need more platters for more storage and that eventually leads into higher costs so that's part of why they're more expensive but it also means that they're a little bit slower because if you pack more gigabytes into a single square inch of space the header has to move less physically when it's seeking for data so the density plays a big impact a big role on how quickly the drive is able to access your data what this means is that a lot of the blue drives are actually slightly faster than black but it's not necessarily all about raw speed blue and black both spin at 7200 rpm they both have about 64 megabytes of cache but blue only comes in a one terabyte capacity that is its maximum capacity so available lower than that one terabyte is the max and green goes up to 6 terabytes at this point black is available from one to four terabytes and blue only goes to one so you generally once you exit one terabyte of 7200 RPM storage you're moving into black space unless you're trying to buy green which again completely different use case scenario so for a primary drive you're really looking at black once you pass one terabyte in terms of performance the WD black drives have a beefier chassis that the drive sits in and that is indicated partly by the drive weight they're a couple tenths of a kilogram difference in weight and the WD black drives are heavier and have a beefier chassis because there are more vibration resistant so if you have a high-performance machine with very high rpm fans or if you've got the drive mounted somewhat differently than normally for example a vertical mount like in an HTP C then you'll want something like a black drive because it's more vibration resistance so there's less chance of the header missing on an access on a file access or on seeking so it'll have longer lifespan and a better endurance as a result of the vibration resistance if that's going to make an impact for you is somewhat up for debate WD blue will really do the job for almost all gaming systems it's 53 bucks for a terabyte at 7200 rpm that's about as good as it gets if you buy black you can get two terabytes that's something like 120 130 dollars it's a little more little heavier endurance and it's about the same speed realistically you really won't see a speed difference in real world use even though you will in benchmarks with WD blue being a little bit faster but the only real reason you buy one or the other is is money and how how your machine is installed if how it's configured if it's a very high performance production rig you're doing video production and you've got high rpm fans and things like that get a black drive because your data will be safer in terms of endurance WD also has a five-year warranty on the black drives but the green and blue only have two year warranties so ultimately the way I would price it out is if you're buying for archival storage get something like a 2 terabyte green just for all your media files if you're buying for a primary drive and you're building a gaming machine probably buy a WD blue drive at 53 dollars 1 terabyte that'll be fine that you started this is assuming you're not buying a solid-state drive which is really what you should be running and if you're buying something for a production rig and you want more than one terabyte at 7200 rpm get black it's it's really that simple there's no magic behind the architecture in each of these drives it's just our PMS and capacity and density that's all it boils down to so if you have any questions about this at all please tweet at us at gamers Nexus post a comment below I'll try to answer it but really tweeting at us is the best way to get in touch at this point and subscribe to this video if you like I will see you all next time peace youhey everyone this is Steve from gamers Nexus tonight and today we're talking about hard drives specifically Western Digital naming convention Seagate has its own name you can mention Hitachi which is owned by WD has its own naming convention but today we're just focused on Western Digital because they use colors which don't necessarily mean a whole lot so their colors are for what we're concerned about green blue and black now there's also red but red is meant for raid usage and network-attached storage raid so we're going to ignore that for today and just focus on the consumer base the desktop drives which would be green blue black online you'll find a lot of forums users and other people generally saying that it's good better best green being the low end blue mid-range and black being high performs so it's not really as easy as just buying one based on the performance you want because they might not do exactly what you want with hard drives there are a few specs that we care about the most there's rpm which is the revolutions per minute that the physical disk the platter spins at there is cache which really after 64 megabytes becomes largely irrelevant for hard drives and then there's capacity and as a result of capacity or leading into capacity is density and both of those are very important as well so at WD green you get higher capacities and you get lower rpms but this means that it's got a lower TDP lore watt requirement or power requirement it's been slower but that means it's quieter so there are different trade-offs this means that you don't want to use WD green for things like a primary drive where your operating system would reside and you really don't want to use it for gaming because it spins up slower it only spins at 54 to 59 hundred rpm it's got a variable rpm so it spins up and down based on the load requirement but that's not fifty nine hundreds pretty slow you want generally 7200 rpm if you're not using an SSD so that means that WD green makes the most sense for archival storage for things like movies photos and music that aren't being accessed constantly and when they are accessed they can be slower in delivery because they're not as high bitrate or high bitrate requirements and i/o requirements as things like the operating system which has a very high i/o requirement or games which have high i/o requirements WD greens had a rocky start in that a lot of them had because they were having to seek errors when the RPM changed this has been mostly resolved in the newer version of the WD green drives but there's still really specific use case scenarios you don't want them for your primary drive so what do you want for your primary drive it's either going to be blue or black if you're looking at Western Digital and the difference between the two is actually not as big as some people might think or lead you to believe first of all WD blues have a higher density than the black drives which means that they're actually faster in a lot of cases depending on which one you buy from each brand and WD blue has a one terabyte per platter density that means it can store a full terabyte of data on a single platter that's the spinning disk whereas the WD black drives have about 800 gigabytes for platter density so you'll need more platters for more storage and that eventually leads into higher costs so that's part of why they're more expensive but it also means that they're a little bit slower because if you pack more gigabytes into a single square inch of space the header has to move less physically when it's seeking for data so the density plays a big impact a big role on how quickly the drive is able to access your data what this means is that a lot of the blue drives are actually slightly faster than black but it's not necessarily all about raw speed blue and black both spin at 7200 rpm they both have about 64 megabytes of cache but blue only comes in a one terabyte capacity that is its maximum capacity so available lower than that one terabyte is the max and green goes up to 6 terabytes at this point black is available from one to four terabytes and blue only goes to one so you generally once you exit one terabyte of 7200 RPM storage you're moving into black space unless you're trying to buy green which again completely different use case scenario so for a primary drive you're really looking at black once you pass one terabyte in terms of performance the WD black drives have a beefier chassis that the drive sits in and that is indicated partly by the drive weight they're a couple tenths of a kilogram difference in weight and the WD black drives are heavier and have a beefier chassis because there are more vibration resistant so if you have a high-performance machine with very high rpm fans or if you've got the drive mounted somewhat differently than normally for example a vertical mount like in an HTP C then you'll want something like a black drive because it's more vibration resistance so there's less chance of the header missing on an access on a file access or on seeking so it'll have longer lifespan and a better endurance as a result of the vibration resistance if that's going to make an impact for you is somewhat up for debate WD blue will really do the job for almost all gaming systems it's 53 bucks for a terabyte at 7200 rpm that's about as good as it gets if you buy black you can get two terabytes that's something like 120 130 dollars it's a little more little heavier endurance and it's about the same speed realistically you really won't see a speed difference in real world use even though you will in benchmarks with WD blue being a little bit faster but the only real reason you buy one or the other is is money and how how your machine is installed if how it's configured if it's a very high performance production rig you're doing video production and you've got high rpm fans and things like that get a black drive because your data will be safer in terms of endurance WD also has a five-year warranty on the black drives but the green and blue only have two year warranties so ultimately the way I would price it out is if you're buying for archival storage get something like a 2 terabyte green just for all your media files if you're buying for a primary drive and you're building a gaming machine probably buy a WD blue drive at 53 dollars 1 terabyte that'll be fine that you started this is assuming you're not buying a solid-state drive which is really what you should be running and if you're buying something for a production rig and you want more than one terabyte at 7200 rpm get black it's it's really that simple there's no magic behind the architecture in each of these drives it's just our PMS and capacity and density that's all it boils down to so if you have any questions about this at all please tweet at us at gamers Nexus post a comment below I'll try to answer it but really tweeting at us is the best way to get in touch at this point and subscribe to this video if you like I will see you all next time peace you\n"