Gigabit is a measure of bandwidth...

buddyroach his explanation is explained wrong. Megabytes and Gigabytes is for measuring volume of data stored in bytes, Megabits and Gigabits is a measure of bandwidth. The maximum amount of bits that can be transferred per second for that interface. And 6Gb/s is --> 6000/8= 750MB of data that is possible to be transferred from one end to another but doesn't include other factors and limitations.

Buy a bx500 and wd purple 4tb

+The Guy Right Up Your Street Don't forget workstations which need Blacks!

+The Guy Right Up Your Street So if i were to use SSD as primary i should just get green to store my data/files? I heard blue/black last longer or have more warranty.

Turboz Raw I have an SSD as my C drive and a Blue as my D drive. I'd recommend Green drives if you need loads of space that would be expensive otherwise. If you can afford it, go for Black or Blue.

Thanks. I was told to go with red for a even safer/quieter option over the greens because the greens have some sort of vibration problem that other WD's have protection for.

Turboz Raw I'm not sure, I don't have personal experience with the Red or Green drives, but unless you're a business or server, Blues or Blacks will always be better options.

+Daniel Piurkowsky In my opinion no, just get a blue for storage and you'll be fine. Blacks are overrated and cost more mostly due to the extended warranty

The Green version is slower ranging from 5400 to 7200 rpm, so basically, using it everyday the head cannot wear off at such speeds, because, if slower the disk is going around, thus slower the head is moving on it...it kinda should give longer life because of that, and because of lower power consumption, but for a year my Green has gotten slower suddenly, I just dunno when firstly noticed changes, and I bought it 2-4 years ago I think, hard to remember, somewhere on warranty paper it is written. So I kinda wish to stick to the warranty theory, that things will start to lose its performance or in worst case scenario - die, after warranty has ended...kinda experience tells it too when most of the things warranty has ended and things start to go boom and you are forced to buy new stuff and suffer in agony because you lost something and you have to wait till you can replace it. I'm considering of buying Black...2TB, just dunno if 1+1 or whole 2TB ... for safety it would be better to go with 1+1TB, one dies, other lives...or something like that, but then it gets a little bit expensive...about 20+ Euro's more than just 2TB in my country.

BIOSHOCKFOXX I'm not too sure if you understand what intellipower does. It causes the head to park after non-usage. Currently the factory is setting is quite low, so unless it's a drive you rarely use it can cause issues from what I hear because it's constantly having to restart moving the arm again. Google it, you'll find quite a few more technologically savvy people than me discussing it and its effects on the longevity of the drive.

Dj4Life777 Desktop drives are limited in the number of spin-up cycles that their mechanics will sustain without damage, and in some use cases it's possible to reach this number in a relatively short time due to Green's somewhat overly aggressive spin-down timeout - something that should be specified on the data sheet, but isn't -.- The SMART counter for spin-up count has its failure threshold and normalization set about 5-10 times more conservatively than real drive failure in many cases. You can look at the raw spin-up counter to judge whether your use-case is abusing the drive, like a handful of spinups per day would be OK but hundreds would be not. The drive spindle is normally suspended by rotation only - fluid dynamics of air gap in the spindle assembly serves as a near frictionless bearing. However, when the drive is spun down, the spindle rests on a mechanical bearing. When the drive is spun up and before it has reached high RPM, the bearing suffers wear. You should keep an eye on raw start-up speed in SMART. It will normally rise a bit over the lifetime of the drive, but when it starts increasing more rapidly or is significantly higher than the original value, the drive needs to be replaced before catastrophic failure occurs. The issue is not per se related to IntelliPower. IntelliPower is WD's proprietary designation for their unwillingness to specify the rotational speed for the drive in the data sheet, meaning that you will certainly receive the drive with less than 7200 RPM, but whether it will be 5400 RPM or 6600 RPM or anything in between is not specified. In this regard, there are certainly some WD drives with "IntelliPower" but without aggressive spin-down which causes the quick bearing wear issue.

Choose one with lower rpm would provide you a quite running state. It means choose from green, red, and purple, while green was not recommended for long-term, reliable use, and, red one seems not matching your condition. If I were you, purple would probably my choice.

I used WD purple 2TB for storage and games for 2 years and it works just fine, just means it's optimized for high read/write cycles that CCTV/surveillance systems use.

Probably Blue

WD black. It's a bit more expensive but you'll get the best performance.

Thanks :)

WD Caviar Black

***** blue is actually faster than black in all benchmark tests and drive tests sadly.... the black at this point only offers a longer warranty

Wreyth - Oh ok, thanks for the info! :D

Black>Red>Blue

***** so should i get a green or blue for my primary?

Koala: I would definitely get a blue!

***** ok thx man :)

Absolutely! I have a blue drive for my music and games, and I've never had lag issues with even some of the more demanding games. Blue should work for almost everyone :)

Bad idea. Like he said, it's not really meant for reading; therefore, streaming will be a little difficult. I'd use a WD Black if I were you, since it has a faster read/write speed and is meant to read more than the WD Purple.

Yea got the purple and works perfect. Black is mostly for gaming

+Darius Glad You can, but it will not really work normally since you'll get lower file read speeds since the Purple drive's optimized for fast write speeds.

+kosh3 It should be okay, but might fail earlier than an equivalent Purple drive.

+MiatakiasGR mazda Me neither. But i found blue is cheaper in higher capacity. I might go for it.

ok man thanks i may go with blue one.. :)

In Soviet Russia, Bill Gates complicates you.

You can RAID any of the colors - the WD Red is more for network attached storage use - in raid and always on. In a desktop PC scenario, WD Black in RAID 1 would be fine (Or, 0+1 or 10, with 4 drives to double speed for fast load times.)

Michael Marquardt OK, clear now. Thank you. :)

So, Can anyone relay information about My book live? Like is it better than My Cloud or worse?

Shplayercz WD Black

Shplayercz blue is faster than black on all drive test speeds

New Community -〉 Game channel Two drives - keep your games separate from the drive you record to. The performance of recording drive will not really matter, just get any low-power storage disk, like the Green or the Red or Purple or whatever crosses your path. The OS and game drives - SSDs if can afford (i.e. Crucial MX100 250GB, but SanDisk 120GB can be had very cheaply and is OK-ish), otherwise maybe the recent Red Pro for games in 2Tb - 4Tb range or WD Blue WD10EZEX for a 1Tb drive (compromise). It's not a good idea to keep OS on Red, because of its short error timeout window, but for games it's OK. Conventional wisdom says not to put swap on the SSD, but if you have sufficient or nearly sufficient RAM, i would do exactly that, put swap on SSD - it won't add much wear and will save you from hitching in a pinch.

+Wreyth - are you serious? take another look

go with the blue, use your ssd for booting and important applications, your games could go on the blue, which will be a bit slower loading times, but you'll be able to store more than on an ssd

+Mc Dragon I dont think you read my comment correctly. I was saying to save the game on the blue (the hard drive)

+Mc Dragon no. I didnt. I said that the loading times will be slower (on a disk drive) and that you'll be able to store more (also on a disk drive). Never did I say for people to save games on the ssd.

Correct, will remember for next time! :)

***** May I just say you may have to have one of the coolest tech jobs :P btw: Do you guys do stuff for high school career day things? It'd be cool to work there for a day :)

black

no the blue one better

Glad I scanned the comments. This is what I was going to point out as there is a pretty significant difference between GBps and Gbps. The large 'B' being Bytes and the smaller 'b' being bits. 8 bits to a Byte people....

You totally misunderstood the information from this video. Purple hdd writes data FASTER and uses less power because of the RPM system, red has more storage, longer warranty and also uses the power saving RPM system.

+Shawn Smith The red drives have firmware features for RAID enviroments. One specific feature relates to error recovery. (WD calls this TLER) On a regular drive, the error control firmware will typically specify a larger number, and your drive will spend additional time trying to access or recover a bad sector. On a regular computer, you OS will just wait that extra time out, no big deal. In a NAS enviroment, the longer error recovery delays will cause the NAS to think the drive has failed and it will drop the drive from the array, or go into rebuild mode degrading the array. This was a "big" issue when NAS's first became popular to the point that WD/Seagate etc. created utilities to modify firmware of drives to disable TLER. In response, NAS specific drives with this feature changed were introduced aka WD Red drives.

+Shawn Smith *facepalms* It's the *customer* that chooses the hard drive they buy depending on their uses. Neglecting SSDs, one can choose to put game files in a small 500GB Black drive and documents on a separate 3TB Green or Blue drive. Purple drives are for surveillance since they are optimized for being written to constantly 24/7. BTW "NAS" means "network attached storage". Basically a cloud storage device. You win the internet for best troll, btw.

+frankytap Ofc not...buy an Samsung 850 Evo, best budget friendly performance Money can buy.

yeah most people choose an SSD for OS if they care about their rig.

+frankytap ssd will always be better and faster, wd black is just bigger and cheaper, though the black will still be better than other mechanical drives for gaming unless you get a wd raptor drive which last i looked were 10,000 rpm so will outperform the black too, another thing to consider is ssd's have a limited life (though mechanical drives wont last forever) im not sure how they compare on this factor

oldskoolhead0 Thank you ! :)

+ch sf blue, not sure if green comes with 7200RPM. Always get 7200RPM for primary/gaming.

somebody301 It does matter. I never argued that SSD's aren't better, but they're simply not worth it. Especially for games. Especially for games that takes 50gigs. SSD space is too friggin limited. By logic and fact, the 7200RPM retrieves data faster then the 5400RPM. Personally, i have an SSD for OS and SSHD for files with 7200RPM.

yeah tbh almost all similar hard drives (like all 7200 and all 5400) have the same performance in real world use.

I think gold came out after this video

Blues are the budget model. At 1TB the specs are pretty much the same, but all of the other drives come in higher capacities. I think the reliability is also lower than the other drives but don't have data to back that up. I think the performance they advertise is in comparison to greens which have a lower RPM (ie. lower throughput) and aggressive powersaving (which increases latency when the drive is powered down)

ghostbirdofprey Historically Blue have had smaller cache size than Black, as well as seek speed was modified - seek max. velocity is the same, but acceleration was traditionally limited on the Blue to reduce the noise. Also Black models sometimes went for short stroke, using only a smaller faster section on the outside rim of the disk. But the 1TB sibling models left apparently so little room for tweaking upwards from Blue WD10EZEX that the particular Black WD1003FZEX came out pretty much identical. It has also been alleged that Black might have been tweaked towards slightly lower performance to enhance its longevity and reliability, potentially even well into its lifecycle after the drive was originally released and reviewed by major outlets.

well atm black is 7200 rpm vs 5400 rpm

shit , just bought one !

The green or low power hard drives made by any hard drive manufacture will only save you $3 to $5 year. If you want to save energy a move from incandescent or even CFL to LED is likely to save you considerably more but you won't really notice that if they are lights that are usually left on. I personally like the light output of LEDs per watt and also like them because the prices are coming down finally. One one my flashlights uses an LED and lithium ion battery. They are very bright and last much longer per charge. Now that is what I call green, the only difference situation, the performance of nothing has suffered as it would with a low power computer hard disk using less power. The problem with the green drives is they turn off with a few minutes of inactivity and are slow to spin back up when accessed again which is annoying. There would be a very noticeable delay in opening any files or programs stored on one. They are always parking the head and that just helps wear it put faster. I had one beginning to fail because of that. I just copied all the stuff from it to a good drive while I still can. Windows was kind enough to warn me with plenty of time left that this was going to happen. The drive was still functioning but I disassembled it and scrapped it knowing it is not a good idea to keep using it. I have a neodymium rare earth magnet I rubbed over the platters after I got them out. They have precious metals on them BTW but the coating is extremely thin and you would need thousands of them to get just a fraction of an ounce of metal.

Kevin who? Durant?

+Viltsu V The underlying architecture for a hard drive will always make tradeoffs between performance, durability, and power consumption, and the way they write to memory (i.e. random access vs sequential). Most people want to know which hard drive is the "best", but the answer depends on what you need a hard drive to do. To explain the architecture is more than most people want to know and would only further overwhelm and confuse them.

+Christine Feaster So I guess I'm in the minority wanting to know how all that stuff works. I guess this video is perfect from an average Joe point-of-view, but for a more technical guy like me... Well.. refer to my original comment.

I mean the drives literally turn off at idle. For desktop drives thats usually not the case and thats why they were such low noise/power consumption but at the cost of performance.