I'm looking at replacing my PC's main HDD very soon. It's slow, clicking, and I want it replaced as soon as financially possible! I have never gotten to grips with the available Hard Drive on the current market - are there any terms and mechanisms I should keep my eye out for? It's for housing my Windows installation, so i heard... a "black label" is reliable for speed etc? I see many "green" related HDDs, I am guessing these are more friendly to the environment?
Personally if its the windows installation drive i would replace it with a SSD, basically Solid State Drive, their sustainably faster and offer next to 0ms read times making applications etc load faster, downside is they are expensive vs HD in terms of storage.
budget? whats tehr est of your rig like? an SSD is an awesome upgrade
Green drives typically run slower. It's not really much to do with the environment. They use a bit less power, run a bit cooler, and spin more slowly. They're great for storing large files, but I wouldn't install an operating system on one.
Black drives are a model of drive sold by Western Digital, and they're meant to represent their "performance" range. Personally, I'm not convinced they're much different to their "blue" drives, which are just standard.
If it runs at 7,200rpm, it'll be much the same as every other drive running at 7,200rpm. Not much differentiation in the market.
Yes, buy on warranty length and ease of getting a replacement; and/or price.
Just been researching on SSDs, they indeed sound amazing, but as for the price... I see what you mean Jasp! As far as WD goes, if the Black/Blue rated drives are more or less equal, what are your opinions on this one from Ebuyer?
http://www.ebuyer.com/393482-wd-1tb-...drive-wd10ezex
difference between blue and black is warranty (blue is 2 years ,used to be 3! and black is 5)
but seriously
once you gone SSD you`ll not want to go back!
It'll be just like every other 7200 rpm drive on the market, such as the Seagate equivalent.Originally Posted by Bounty_Bam
Trust me, there's sod all difference apart from warranty and price, just as Thorsson said in post #5.
Unless you get a Sandforce based SSD and it fails on you, as happened on my wife's machine. She has a WD Black now and won't go back
Blue drives are almost as fast as Black. Black are measurably faster in benchmarks but not enough to really feel it. If you like a quiet machine you are better off with Blue as the seek isn't as noisy.
Red drives seem to be Black drives with different warranty and firmware (for raid devices), but should work fine as a main drive if you find a good deal on one.
Edit to add: That drive on ebuyer, I have the 500GB verson as a Linux drive, it will do fine. If your drive is ticking though, just buy something as you are probably on very borrowed time.
Last edited by DanceswithUnix; 16-01-2013 at 11:57 PM.
Any drive that fails on you you're gonna be pissed about, but spinning media can fail early too.
If you want to be secure(-er) buy two of whatever kind of drive and mirror them. And still do backups.
SSDs make an immense difference to your system though, I never want to go back to clunky old hard disks.
SSD's will definitely take over until HDD's are obsolete.
I would also say that backing up your hard drives is something to look into, as when they fail on you it's not fun.
SO although buying an SSD is a good idea, another option which could potentially be cost effective is to buy a new HDD and a HDD enclosure.
Last time I checked I thought the WD black-rated drives meant it was designed with enterprise in mind, so the failure rate is lower (and the warranty longer, along with the price)... But yeah, blue is usually fine, and green ones usually spin at a slower rate, using less power, but also running not quite as fast.
If you can afford it then definitely get an SSD to install your operating system (i.e... Windows) onto, along with at least your most used programs. It's a massive step up in responsiveness. I do that, and have all my music/pictures etc on a slower HDD.
The best thing to do if you are looking to judge speed of SSD or HDD is to lookup benchmark charts or reviews to get a basic idea how it stacks up to the competition, then you won't need to worry too much about the specific terminology...
red is enterprise , black is performance
Red is NAS.
AHA! and RE drives are green with longer warranty
RE stands for RAID edition, those are the enterprise drives: http://wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=30
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions
LinkBack URL
About LinkBacks
Reply With Quote