WD stirs green and blue into pot, comes out with Blue HDDs WD is abandoning its Green drive branding, moving the Green drive product line into the Blue brand so as to have a single mainstream PC brand. The WD Blue drives are 3.5-inch jobs designed for desktop and all-in-one PCs with capacity running up to 6TB. They came from the older Caviar and Scorpio Blue lines and rotated at 7, …
This post has been deleted by its author
This post has been deleted by its author
This post has been deleted by its author
@Morten; Please excuse my scepticism, but I'm sceptical. ;-)
I thought the original green/blue/black scheme was nice and simple, and I understood the introduction of the red for "NAS" use (which I parsed as "server-y et al"). However, I thought they were starting to overdo it and blurring the boundaries when they introduced the purple designation. Seriously, I'm not convinced the alleged differences between purple's sequential use and red's random access is going to be that big a deal in practice. Do you really need that minor (supposed) performance improvement to record some crap-quality security footage of someone stealing kids clothing? If you needed the extra bandwidth that much, it's probably not going to be enough anyway- you may as well move to SSD.
With the so-called "data center" gold classification it's going to be even less obvious to the layperson what the difference is between the reds, purples and golds beyond possible marketing and guarantees.
The "green" classification seemed distinct and clear as to its intended purpose. It's a shame they're getting rid of it. I've had a WD green drive for six years in my main PC and no problems.
This post has been deleted by its author
I saw a news item the other week where they were looking at branded painkillers labelled as being for specific things - headaches, period pains, sinus pain, etc - and they were all basically the same active ingredient and dose, no difference other than the label. I have to say prior to a recent purchase, I had some trouble figuring out what exactly the differences between the different colours of WD drive actually were. You have to wonder.
The blacks supposedly have more/better hardware, and the reds supposedly have firmware mods to cut down on excessive retries causing problems in RAID arrays.
Clearly, nobody cared about "green-ness", showing that Lewis Page is right on the practical impact of climate change.
All of them are GARBAGE. Even the blacks. Now that WD's HGST is set to disappear, and Toshiba is replacing the good stuff it inherited from Hitachi[*], and Seagate drearily remains complete rubbish, there will be no acceptable hard drives any more. SSDs win by default, at prohibitive prices though.
[*] For the doubters, that's right. I have some early Toshiba DT01ACA300s that have "Device Model: Hitachi HDS723030BLE640" in the SMART data, and a lot more that are later and have "Device Model: TOSHIBA DT01ACA300", but they are all the same design from the same production line, and all of them have the identical "Firmware Version: MX6OABB0". Now Toshiba is rolling out the P300 which has essential identical specs but is a complete unknown, and will doubtless replace the superb DT01ACA300. I have very poor expectations.
When they fail, they actually fail harder then HDDs because recovery is exponentially more difficult, and you have even less warning.
For the moment, I have two SSDs on my desktop that are doing their job properly, so no complaints. But a colleague of mine had an SSD in his laptop that he was very happy about until the day it stopped working. He lost nothing of significance because backups, but the disk basically bricked itself and getting a replacement shipped in cost him two days.
He has stopped ribbing me for preferring my slower, 500GB HDD in my laptop.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
