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WD Caviar Black vs Green vs Blue
- Thread starter Jon55
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For their newest models they seem to be dropping the Blue line. If the drive is going to be used for your OS, get a Black, or Blue if money is an issue. Otherwise, for storage use the greens. I own 4 of the 1 TB Greens. 1 of the 4 was DOA, but the others have worked just fine.
Don
Don
Well my only concern here is performance among this lineup. Which is where my question comes in: are the Black drives really that much faster than the Blue or Green drives?
Zepher
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I have noticed that Blue has 8MB cache and Black has 32MB. I recently bought 2 Blue drives for some old systems and noticed that both had 8MB cache.
Maybe Green has 16MB of cache.
I would opt for the Black series drives myself.
Edit: I just checked and Cache isn't related to series.
Blue and Green are 3 year warranties while Black are 5.
Maybe Green has 16MB of cache.
I would opt for the Black series drives myself.
Edit: I just checked and Cache isn't related to series.
Blue and Green are 3 year warranties while Black are 5.
Many of the blue series feature 16MB cache, depends on the particular model. For example: wd6400aaks
The blue wd6400aaks and black wd6401aals are very close in performance. Can't really go wrong either way.
The blue wd6400aaks and black wd6401aals are very close in performance. Can't really go wrong either way.
Syntax Error
2[H]4U
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It really comes down to warranty...the Blacks come with an additional two years warranty on top of the Green and Blue's three year warranty, so you have to judge whether or not the extra two years of warranty is worth the additional cost (usually slight, like $5-10).
Then again, you also have to think if you're even going to keep using a drive for five years...five years is a long time in the world of tech.
Then again, you also have to think if you're even going to keep using a drive for five years...five years is a long time in the world of tech.
danwat1234
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NO! The Green uses 'Intellipower', which is a marketing gimmick which means that it spins at 5200RPM all the time (not 5400).
Caviar blue = 5400RPM
Caviar Black = 7200RPM
If you realize that the number one bottleneck in a computer system is the secondary storage devices (hard drives, optical, etc), you will see that the Caviar Black is the best way to go, even for the purpose of a storage drive. Imagine how much longer a backup of that drive would take if it were a Green vs a Black, not to mention the I/O benefit you gain if you want to do more than one thing at once with the drive.
Wow, completely forgot about this thread! Might as well do a followup...
So I ended up going with the WD Scorpio Black 320 GB drive for my laptop (going from a 5400 RPM 250 GB stock drive). At the time, it was the largest/fastest Scorpio Black drive on the market. This drive is definitely fast (compared to other HDD's) and I have no regrets. But I still cant ignore how much faster SSD's are. Hopefully their price will drop by a solid amount within the next year or so.
EDIT: Not sure why I put Caviar in the title, I was trying to ask about 2.5" HDDs.
So I ended up going with the WD Scorpio Black 320 GB drive for my laptop (going from a 5400 RPM 250 GB stock drive). At the time, it was the largest/fastest Scorpio Black drive on the market. This drive is definitely fast (compared to other HDD's) and I have no regrets. But I still cant ignore how much faster SSD's are. Hopefully their price will drop by a solid amount within the next year or so.
EDIT: Not sure why I put Caviar in the title, I was trying to ask about 2.5" HDDs.
Which blue drives are you looking at that are 5400 rpm?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136073
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136111
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136109
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136113
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136098
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136534
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136534
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136040
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136112
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136195
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136218
Cause all the ones listed on newegg are 7200.
And no on this a little too. Blue's are also 7200 rpm.
Edit: Cyclone beat me to it. I guess I hadn't refreshed the page in a while
Green spins at 5400RPM, never mind what WD marketing tries to tell you. Blue and Black spin at 7200RPM. Blue & Black are nice OS drives, with Black having the edge in performance. Greens make great storage drives.
Green = reduced power
Thus; perfect for mass-storage data!
Half the power-consumption, half the heat, better heat distribution, less vibrations, generally higher reliability and more quiet.
And still fast: the newest 5400rpm disks like Samsung F4EG push around 140MB/s sequential reads; not bad at all for a 5400rpm drive. For your OS you would want an SSD instead for random I/O performance; or use a conventional 7200rpm disk if you can't afford that. Though we shouldn't exaggerate the performance difference between the two spindle speeds for suitability to run your OS.
Therefore the most crucial spec is not spindle speed; but platter capacity and thus data density. I look at HDDs like "this is a 500GB-platter generation HDD"; this tells you generally how the drive will perform. If you use 7200rpm it's 25% faster; yeeeah! But also 50% more power; naaah!
So i guess we should see 5400rpm and 2,5" HDDs more often than conventional 3,5" 7200rpm disks which were the norm until now; where we see more 2,5" HDDs being sold than 3,5" HDDs. And low rpm has become quite successful as well; rightfully so if i may add.
Half the power-consumption, half the heat, better heat distribution, less vibrations, generally higher reliability and more quiet.
And still fast: the newest 5400rpm disks like Samsung F4EG push around 140MB/s sequential reads; not bad at all for a 5400rpm drive. For your OS you would want an SSD instead for random I/O performance; or use a conventional 7200rpm disk if you can't afford that. Though we shouldn't exaggerate the performance difference between the two spindle speeds for suitability to run your OS.
Therefore the most crucial spec is not spindle speed; but platter capacity and thus data density. I look at HDDs like "this is a 500GB-platter generation HDD"; this tells you generally how the drive will perform. If you use 7200rpm it's 25% faster; yeeeah! But also 50% more power; naaah!
So i guess we should see 5400rpm and 2,5" HDDs more often than conventional 3,5" 7200rpm disks which were the norm until now; where we see more 2,5" HDDs being sold than 3,5" HDDs. And low rpm has become quite successful as well; rightfully so if i may add.
After a lot of research, this is pretty much what I came out with. Except that the line (read: speed) between Black and Blue Scorpio lines can be very thin sometimes. Meaning, the Blue is sometimes just as fast as the Black (or very close). Honestly, the difference in speed between the three lines isn't that huge, but Black is definitely the speediest of the 3.
That said, even some of the shittier 3.5" HDD's can beat the Scorpio Black. God I can't wait till SSD's fall in price.
Dangman
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Depends on which drives. Some of the Blue drives outperform the Black drives. In fact, some of the Green drives also outperform the Black drives. Only two Black drives ( A 2TB model and a 1TB model IIRC) actually outperforms their Blue and Green counterparts completely theses days.
So yeah you can't really determine the value of a WD drive just by their colors. Now you really have to compare them model by model as you would with other drive manufacturers.
WD's 2TB 7200rpm black is still 4 platters of 500GB; thus a newer WD Green EARS with 3-platters of 666GB would be almost the same sequential performance, because the green drive has higher capacity platters this makes the performance difference smaller than the spindle speed implies. Also, when new disks come out, they often first produce 5400rpm and only later 7200rpm. Not really sure what the reason for this is.
So people buying black for speed; well i think if they really know all the facts that they might just prefer a slightly less fast 5400rpm disk at half the power consumption instead. But due to its higher capacity platters it would still rival the sequential performance of 7200rpm disks.
So people buying black for speed; well i think if they really know all the facts that they might just prefer a slightly less fast 5400rpm disk at half the power consumption instead. But due to its higher capacity platters it would still rival the sequential performance of 7200rpm disks.
nobody_here
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well this is highly inaccurate......the blues are 7200rpm also
i own a 320Gb AAKS myself, depending on the benchmark and status of the drive i have seen it run 100Mb/sec
If you see the sequential transfer speed on the outer tracks of that WD3200AAKS drive as around 110 MB/s, you have the single-platter version of that drive. But if your particular drive benches at only 70-ish MB/s, you have the older two-platter version. And there were a few very early 320GB WD Blues that were three-platter designs; they top out at around 65 MB/s.
[LYL]Homer
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fixed
smodtactical
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I agree with this. I've been running a 1.5 TB caviar green with win7 x64 for about a year now and I have 0 problems. It seems pretty fast all around as well.
nobody_here
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ah ok, im running RAID 0 BLue AAKS 320Gb drives now and its running around 250Mb/s transfer rate on the high end
Homer, I tend to agree but the more reviews/articles I read on SSD, the more nervous I get. If the OS writes alot, the SSD gets slower (HDD does too) at first but after a few months or a yr, the SSD will fail permanently. Bits get stuck. At least a HDD can be rewritten to a known clean state (complete wipe/reinstall). What kind of warranty do you typically get on an SSD?
I currently use a WD green drive, partitioned for c: os/apps and d: data. I'd like to keep the drive to use for data only and buy a new drive for dual boot. So, at first I thought, no big deal just get an SSD and load Win7 and Ubuntu. When I see SSD reviews from users, it's not all glowing. However a WD black drive may blow the power budget for my SFF supply.
I currently use a WD green drive, partitioned for c: os/apps and d: data. I'd like to keep the drive to use for data only and buy a new drive for dual boot. So, at first I thought, no big deal just get an SSD and load Win7 and Ubuntu. When I see SSD reviews from users, it's not all glowing. However a WD black drive may blow the power budget for my SFF supply.
I bought WD Blue 1TB drives for my raid. The black will be slightly faster in a few tasks, but in general they are very close. I figured if I was buying a stack of drives, for the same price I could get 6 WD Blue instead of 4 WD Black and that would obviously be much quicker.
The 5 year warranty on the blacks though would be nice. Maybe next time.
And I use the 2TB Green drives for backup/storage.
The 5 year warranty on the blacks though would be nice. Maybe next time.
And I use the 2TB Green drives for backup/storage.
Here ya go you'll like this
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/hdd-2010_13.html#sect0
Do a search there on the big 2 & 3TB drives too.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/hdd-2010_13.html#sect0
Do a search there on the big 2 & 3TB drives too.
Wherever you are reading this FUD about SSDs, find somewhere else to "research".
So I just RMA'd by 640gb WD Black drive and they sent me a 1tb blue drive.
Model number WD10EALS-002BA0 and this blue drive has a 32mb cache.
I don't really need that extra space for my desktop so I don't necessarily care that it's bigger. Should I keep it or complain?
Model number WD10EALS-002BA0 and this blue drive has a 32mb cache.
I don't really need that extra space for my desktop so I don't necessarily care that it's bigger. Should I keep it or complain?
Red Falcon
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The main difference between the Blacks and Blues are this:
The Blacks tend to have more cache than the Blues and also have dual-core controller CPUs, where as the Blues (and Greens) have a single-core controller.
The Blacks tend to have more cache than the Blues and also have dual-core controller CPUs, where as the Blues (and Greens) have a single-core controller.
Red Falcon
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I would keep it, it will be much faster due to the higher platter density.
Red Falcon
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[LYL]Homer;1036184025 said:
Only for those who don't need a SSD and do need large storage for the OS, mainly for video editing and caching large files that could not be done on a SSD.
Also, that's your opinion, not fact.
The blue is generally faster.
If you look at HD Tune marks, the 640 black is about 60min/95avg/120max/12ms. The 1TB blue is about 65/110/140/13ms.
The caveat is that generally blues have 3 year warranty and blacks have 5. So make sure they don't cut your warranty shorter than it should be after the replacement if it's been <2 years.
Anand's site and Toms hardware. But maybe I was reading year-old articles. You tell me - are SSDs really reliable? I know the enterprise (expensive) ones are better. They use SLC flash parts. But the consumer grade use MLC which are more prone to have stuck bits from being rewritten too many times. Flash MLC have write endurance of only 5k program/erase cycles whereas SLC spec 100k cycles. Check out Numonyx/Micron specs. The MLC flash parts are dramatically worse. 5000 program/erase cycles, come on, that aint a whole lot. But it's not just the Anand/Tom websites -- check out the reviews from users on newegg.
You might want to loosen the tin-foil hat.
SSDs are a lot more reliable than regular mechanical drives. You could move a shit-ton of data every day for 5 years and still not hit the read/write cycle limits. I'm talking 100GB of data, a day (the average user probably moves 2-5GB, a power user moving 20-30 maybe). The point is that other drive components will fail before you hit the read/write cycle limit. And yes, I'm talking about the "lesser" consumer MLC stuff. Maybe you're thinking of the first generation stuff? Because Tom's and Anand articles will tell you the same thing that I'm telling you.
As Surly73 said, wherever you're getting your info from, they're either very old articles on very old SSDs, or very one-sided. Have you actually used a modern SSD before?
No, I havent used an SSD before - that's why I'm asking. I was ready to buy one and started to read up, got cold feet. But you're giving me some confidence. I want to get a small capacity to install OS/apps and keep my WD green hdd for data storage. I was looking at Kingston SSDs but the 8G got marginal reviews while the 16G model got good reviews. Does the 8G drive use older flash chips?
Ah, my apologies. They're still pretty expensive, and the next generation probably won't come down in price much (although they will be much better performance-wise). But expect to pay at least $200 for 120GB.
Where's the best place to get decent comparison disk benchmarks by model#? I have to make a decision between a WD1502FAEX Black or WD15EARS Green in the next hour or so and google just gives me tons of places to buy these drives.
I've found one pair of sites:
Black: http://www.harddrivebenchmark.net/hdd_lookup.php?cpu=WDC+WD1502FAEX
Green: http://www.harddrivebenchmark.net/hdd_lookup.php?cpu=WDC+WD15EARS
Which shows that the black scores twice as high on Passmark as the green. I have no idea how passmark does it's testing and whether it's capturing the potentially superior sequential performance for greens and blues with higher platter density or if it's just evaluating random performance.
The disk I'm buying will be replacing the 7200.10 HDD in my current system. I use an X-25M for boot/OS/apps and I have games and data on the HDD. The games probably still benefit from random I/O and the data from sequential.
The black is out of stock (but I can wait) and costs twice as much as the green. I don't want to end up with less performance than my 7200.10 by going "green". I leaning in the direction of the green but I'm having trouble finding sufficiently detailed hard facts to back up my decision.
I've found one pair of sites:
Black: http://www.harddrivebenchmark.net/hdd_lookup.php?cpu=WDC+WD1502FAEX
Green: http://www.harddrivebenchmark.net/hdd_lookup.php?cpu=WDC+WD15EARS
Which shows that the black scores twice as high on Passmark as the green. I have no idea how passmark does it's testing and whether it's capturing the potentially superior sequential performance for greens and blues with higher platter density or if it's just evaluating random performance.
The disk I'm buying will be replacing the 7200.10 HDD in my current system. I use an X-25M for boot/OS/apps and I have games and data on the HDD. The games probably still benefit from random I/O and the data from sequential.
The black is out of stock (but I can wait) and costs twice as much as the green. I don't want to end up with less performance than my 7200.10 by going "green". I leaning in the direction of the green but I'm having trouble finding sufficiently detailed hard facts to back up my decision.