WD, Also Known As Western Digital Corporation is an American computer hard disk drive manufacturer and data storage company. This giant storage manufacturer is located in San Jose, California, and is one of the largest computer hard disk drive manufacturers. WD manufactures and markets data storage devices across the globe and its devices are one of the most trusted storage devices across the world. This article aims at explaining what the Western Digital hard drive colors mean.
The WD hard disk drives come designed in six different colors, and each of them has a specific meaning it stands for that you should be aware of. These colors include green, purple, blue, gold, and black. Don’t ask what these Western Digital hard drive colors mean because it is what I am about to expound on below.
Read Also: 3 Secure Hard Drive Data wiping methods
WD Black
Now if you need to enjoy the best performance out of WD HDD storage, you will have to buy yourself WD Black. These disks usually come ranging from 1TB to 6TB of full storage. Now, these are not meant for general usage but for workstations, gamers’ computers and kiosks, and other operations that require high performance and functionality. The most amazing thing about WD HDD Black is that they come with cache space of up to 128MB which is more than that of WD Blue.
WD Red
In this color, we have two versions of WD HDD. There is the WD Red and the WD Red pro as we shall be seeing. The difference between the two is that WD Red is only compatible with the NAS systems, and has a capacity ranging from 1TB to 14TB, and also has the capability to obtain support from RAID configuration whereas WD Red is more useful and responsive in reading than writing operations. However, both these are meant/designed to be inserted in a Network assisted storage (NAS)
WD Blue
WD HDD that comes in the blue color is said to be very reliable as compared to the rest of the colors. If you are the kind of person who is tied to his computer, thus, you use your computer on a daily basis, then, you will need to get yourself this WD HDD Blue. You can use HDD blue to store things like music, games, movies, and files. WD HDD that come in color blue range from 259GB to 6TB with 5200 rpm revolutions per minute.
WD Green
Similar to WD Blue, WD Green performs general operations; however, WD stopped manufacturing this type sometime back. It was replaced with SATA SDD, so, don’t expect to find this type on the market anymore.
WD Purple
Coming to the WD Purple HDD, I can’t go without mentioning that this type of WD HDD is best used as a surveillance storage disk for CCTV system. These may be installed at home, work places, schools, and around medical laboratory environments to store all data that comes from the CCTV cameras.
This type of WD HDD is said to have high sustainability of up to 24 hours in 7 days and can also support up to 64 HD cameras concurrently. Like I have hinted, this disk type is for security systems and it comes with storage space ranging between 1TB to 14TB.
WD Gold
Lastly, let’s talk about WD Gold. This type is mainly used for enterprise-class storage systems and data centers; thus, used in servers. If you are working in such complicated systems that request from data simultaneously, then, your need to incorporate the Golden HDD for all your data storage operations.
WD HDD Gold comes with storage space ranging from 1TB to 18TB and is said to be reliable in handling a staggering 2.5 million hours MTBF.