Released only a few years ago, the WD Purple HDD series is designed for Surveillance requirements. This is sort of true – the better the camera, the more features and better recording. A couple of years ago WD saw the popularity of Hybrid drive technology (A drive that was HDD in design with platters and moving parts, but with a small portion of SSD NAND chip on board for your BOOT and mission critical software to run from). WD offers a broader, more comprehensive portfolio of NAS solutions for customers. We compared the WD Red SA500 against a few other mainstream SSDs. The WD red and purple share the same data transfer speed of 178 MB/S for their 8 TB models. The answer is yes. So, from the above information, you can learn that the transfer rate of WD Red and WD Blue hard drive has no obvious differences. Due to its great performance and reliability, it is great for gamers and workstations. Once you know what each colour means, then you can pretty much narrow down ever WD drive easily. We start with the most cost effective and budget drive of all, the WD Blue HDD series. Overall, the differences between WD Green and Red drives are very subtle. 4. Help Others! Once these would have been recommended for use for your operating system inside a non mission-critical PC (general browsing etc), but now with the inexpensive of SSD in 128-512GB and it becoming ideal for your operating system, start up and primary apps, the WB Blue hard drive has been demoted to basic storage use. Then click Destination module to choose a target disk. WD Red Plus 2.5” NAS hard drives are specifically designed to work together in a NAS environment (up to 8 bays) to deliver fast access speeds, data mirroring, and massive storage capacity. WD Gold, probably the most premium of all, is made for a multitude of Datacenter-specific applications. Some are older and have since ceased production, some are more enterprise versions of the drives above and others are just…well…plain weird and don’t fit in the spectrum of WD Colours whatsoever. According to the official site of Western Digital, the transfer rate of WD Red is up to 180MB/s (6TB model). What are the WD colors and what do they mean? Or they can choose to upgrade their original hard drive to this large WD Blue hard drive so as to improve computer performance or help them to save more data and files. So, the second difference between WD Red and WD Blue is the hard drive capacity. We will not share your email with any third party companies. This time around they have played it smarter. As previously mentioned, several of the WD Color HDD range are available in a mysterious PRO range. WD Red for Home and SMB Use WD Red HDD at your home or business to stream, … NASware 3.0 technology allows you to stream, backup, share, and organize all of your digital content and connect your devices at home and in the office. You should not use WD Blue in a RAID and is cheifly designed for everyday storage needs where Read and Write speeds are not paramount. CES 2021Buffalo launches 40GBASE-T compatible CAT8 LAN cabTerraMaster F8-422 10Gb high-speed quad-core NASDSM 7.0 BETA download AvailablePegasusPro Thunderbolt NAS Collaborative Video Edi. While it is suitable for a single PC use, the WD Red comes with NASware firmware, so it will support NAS systems with up to 8 bays. Keep It Simple, Stupid! The transfer rate of WD Blue is up to 175MB/s (6TB model). You can also test the hard drive performance by using MiniTool Partition Wizard, whose Disk Benchmark feature can do that. The Western Digital Velociraptor was one of the fastest commercially available HDD in the world! Unlike almost all other HDD use across all environments, Hard Disks used in Surveillance are more than 95% used for Writing and 5% for reading – i.e footage is recorded and written to the drives constantly and only accessed rarely by comparison (the reading of the disk). SAS and generally all enterprise level HDD that are designed for the intense operations of data centers till relatively recently arrived in the WD Ae, WD Se and WD Re series (as well as the Xe series too). So, if you are looking to populate a NAS, then definitely go for WD Red. If you have any different ideas of WD Red vs WD Blue, you can leave a message in the comment zone. WD Red Plus is the new name for conventional magnetic recording (CMR)-based NAS drives in the WD Red family, including all capacities from 1TB to 14TB. When the disk cloning process is finished, you will receive a warning message, telling you that the source disk and the target disk have the same signature. Now, we will show you how to upgrade your hard drive to the WD Blue hard drive. The most recent addition to the WD Colors collection. Some with a 10,000RPM speed (but arriving in a much higher Price per GB), some in SAS (the 12GB/s connection) and others in SATA (6GB/s) but the whole range was starting to become rather messy and given that the specs in many cases were comparable to the PRO series, WD decided to phase most of them out in favour of the WD Gold series (available in both SAS and SATA). The WD Pro Series – Available in Red and Purple. Both WD and Seagate are two famous hard drive brands. Then you will receive a warning message which tells you that all data on the target disk will be destroyed. Do not know the differences between WD Red and WD Blue? WD Red Drives are designed to be used in this RAID environments too and for greater lengths of time. WD Black HDD are designed for high performance Hard Disk media use. This is a hard drive for PCs. Then click Finish. The WD Green series, once very popular, is largely overlooked these days. Post was not sent - check your email addresses! It comes with high capacity, fast sequential write and read speed, and is affordable. WD Red is a kind of NAS hard drive with the red cover as the following image shows. You might think that when using multiple IP or Cable Surveillance cameras in the home, office or retail sector, that you should only really think about the quality of hte cameras. ), WD have just stuck to a simple colour code system of Drives. Yes, they are more expensive – but you have to spread that cost across the 5 Year warranty (as apposed to the 2 and 3 Years availa with non PRO drives) as well as the improved results of a faster spin and larger cache and its effect on your productivity. The price of hard drive varies according to the hard drive capacity. On her spare time, Tina likes to watch a movie, go shopping or chat with a friend and enjoys her life. There are a few other models and terms that you should be aware of. Western Digital provides every WD Red hard drive with a 3-year limited warranty. The always-on environment of a NAS or RAID is a hot one. Looking for a Deal on a NAS Drive? In this environment, a  WD Blue is just no longer suited and though will perfect the job, will do so much slower and is susceptible to errors and potential HDD Failure. They are designed to use less power than other Hard Drives as well as producing less vibration or heat whilst in use. To do that, you can choose to migrate the OS and all data on the hard drive to the new WD Blue hard drive. If there are important files on it, please back up them first. A very qwerky and unique HDD, sadly most units are also no longer available to buy. This post from MiniTool will show you the differences between WD Red and WD Blue hard drive. The only major differentiating factor between the drives is the capacity and the rated endurance. Western Digital was founded on April 23, 1970, by Alvin B. Phillips, a Motorola employee, as General Digital, initially a manufacturer of MOS test equipment. Packed with power to handle the small- to medium-sized business NAS environments and increased workloads 1 for SOHO customers, WD Red™ Plus is ideal for archiving and sharing, as well as RAID array rebuilding on systems using ZFS and other file systems. WD Red Best Uses (Network Attached Storage) Although not for gaming, the commonness of home based cloud storage, SOHO environments, RAIDs, and server investments make the WD Red … This coupled with poor marketing (rare on WDs part) and a lack of education provided to consumers on it’s benefits mean that it ended up missing target and eventually being abandoned. This of course does mean they are available in smaller capacities and the read and write is of a lower speed, so these should never be used as a primary OS Boot drive or for a large scale RAID enclosure (early varients were but since then much more tailored drives have been released). The new WD range of WD SSD Blue, Green and Black (with WD Red SSD Sure to follow for SSD Cache in NAS or something) are available in standard 2.5″ SSD size and m.2 – the growing in popularity much, much smaller SSD that utilzes your m.2 PCIe slot. Give it your tough workloads WD Red™ SSD’s superior endurance can handle the heavy read and write loads demanded by NAS, giving you the reliability you need in a 24/7 environment. From the above information, you have known some differences between WD Red and WD Blue. NAS drives are built to endure the constant vibrations and thermal envelope inherent to multi-drive systems. ? WD’s website says this about the WD Red 2TB to 12TB 6Gbit/s SATA disk drives: “With drives up to 14TB, the WD Red series offers a wide array of solutions for customers looking to build a high performing NAS storage solution. They have priced the units better, made hundreds of pages of information on the range and like the HDD above) have separated each to a defined use. To back up this level of use, WD provide a 5 Year warranty on these drives. This is possibly the most important factor in WD’s structure these last 5 years or more. Therefore, how to replace hard drive without reinstalling OS and lossing? The Western Digital Blue is the hard-disk drive (HDD) built for the desktop, while the Black takes things to the next level for professionals and gamers. In this situation, you can try MiniTool ShadowMaker, which can help you to clone OS from HDD to SSD without data loss. You may also learn which one is better and which one suits best. Of course the HDD and SSD market is so big that even a fantastic system like the WD Colors Guide will not quite cover it all. Although not for gaming, it is worth mentioning the home based cloud storage, SOHO environment, RAIDs, and server investments. Experienced in NAS In all the cultures around the world, first impressions are what leave a mark. However since the market increase in demand of SSD and the release of WD Gold, we have seen demand fall greatly – even in spite of a 1TB version being released. From the above chart, you can learn that both of them provide large storage sizes, allowing you to save a lot of files, high resolution photos, 4k videos, etc. As for WD Blue vs Red, this post has shown their differences in several aspects. Finally, WD Red HDDs have firmware onboard that controls the disks behaviour in a NAS server, catering from everything vibration and temperature sensitivity, all the way through to intelligent spin speed and cache allocation. Not to be deterred, WD have entered this arena of Solid State Drives again, but this time utilzing their already popular and established colors model. The WD formula of success has led the growth of the Red NAS range into higher capacities and expansion into new 2.5-inch solutions. The 500GB and 1TB models of WD Blue come with 7200 rpm class, and the left is 5400 rpm class. This post shows some differences between these two hard drive form factors. Exactly what is expected for NAS storage, because data is stored on a network and multiple users will connect at the same time to read it. WD Red™ for Personal or Home Office Stream, backup, share, and organize your digital content at home with a NAS and WD Red™ drives designed to effortlessly share content with the devices in your personal or home office environments. • WD Red Plus is the new name for conventional magnetic recording (CMR)-based NAS drives in the WD Red family, including all capacities from 1TB to 14TB. Have a look below a the glossary of WD HDD extras! WD Blue is a kind of PC hard drive with the blue cover as the following image shows. Western Digital’s WD Red™ Plus NAS drives can suit many storage system requirements; adding performance and reliability for systems that operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Hard drive capacity is a key factor when selecting a hard drive. Connect the disk to your computer by using USB-SATA adaptor. 7. WD Blue hard drives are mainly used for general purpose storage. Related article: 5400 RPM vs 7200 RPM: Is RPM Still Important? This is the most important aspect of differentiating among these drives. As an industry-leading hard drive manufacturer, Western Digital stands behind their PC storage solutions with a 2-year limited warranty included with every WD Blue hard drive. The WD Pro HDD are arrive with a 5 year warranty, more rugged industrial design for long term stability, a fixed 7200rpm (so improved read and writes), larger amount of achefor additional data handling and overall are designed for more mission critical and long term use. 1. First NAS for plex, 1 camera surveillance, and alternative to one drive. Western Digital offers both mechanical and solid-state drive storage devices. With a dedicated 7200 RPM, 128MB Cache and 5 Year warranty, the western digital black drive is the choice for those that was reliability, speed and long-term  piece of mind. Please do not interrupt the disk cloning process until it is finished. Tina is a technology enthusiast and has joined MiniTool since 2018. per Terabyte: Around £25-28. Western Digital have been in the hard drive and SSD market since the 1970s and I think it is safe to say that are one of the biggest and best storage media providers in the world. WD Red Drives are designed exclusively for network attached storage and should be used exclusively for that purpose. The original colour of NAS, WD's formula of success has led growth of WD red into higher capacities and expansion into 2.5 inch solutions. What are the differences between 2.5 HDD and 3.5 HDD? The WD Blue Hard Drive for Basic Desktop Use, The WD Red Hard Drive for NAS and RAID needs, The WD Green Series of Hard Drives for Lower Power Consumption for quieter and Cooler requirements, The WD Black Series for those that need rugged, enduring, fast long-term data stability, The WD Purple Series for CCTV, Network and Direct Recording Surveillance needs, The WD Gold Series for Data Centers, Bulk Cold Storage solutions and High Capacity Workloads. WD RED SA500 SATA SSD – For NAS Server Use in Caching and/or Live Access Possibly the most well know WD HDD Color we will talk about today, WD Red is … WD Blue is a kind of PC hard drive. Error recovery Controls: WD Red NAS hard drives are specifically designed with RAID error recovery control to help reduce failures within the NAS system. Seagate WD Red SA500 Specs. I have bundled these two together as they are both of interest, but for seperate yet oddly similar reasons. Possibly the most well know WD HDD Color we will talk about today, WD Red is the Drive you need for your NAS Server. Built and tested for up to 8-bay NAS systems, these drives give you the flexibility, versatility, and confidence in storing and sharing your … You can look at the following chart to know the hard drive capacity differences. It comes with large storage size, offering a wide range of storage for customers to build a NAS solution. per Terabyte: WD Red is lower in price: Cache: Up to 128 MB: 16 MB and 64 MB Below are each of the colours and what they are used for. Also, it is well known that Data Centers get through drives much quicker than most HDD Media environments and though the WD Gold Series (available in both SATA and SAS) are more expensive than most hard drives, this cost will pale into comparison to if you filled your data center with WD Blue or WD Green drives and they required replacement more often – as well as the Read and Write operations on the non-gold drives being efficiency and productivity down too. Alternatively, why not try asking NAS Community or join forces yourself. Then the disk cloning process will begin. Additionally, if you are using a Network video recording device (NVR), that you use the NVR specialised WD Purple NVR HDD.            So, now you know why Western Digital is widely regarded as one of the best HDD manufacturers in the industry, let’s delve a little deeper into what each of the colors mean. ?NAS Advice Please ?Replace Netgear Readynas NV+?First NAS as a Video Professional: for Back-up and File Sharing?What is flash memory used for? How to Upgrade Hard Drive to WD Blue Without Data Loss? This is once again largely due to the manufacturing technique of HDD becoming far more efficient, as well as SSD media becoming lower in price. In addition, the performance of hard drive will be affected by the RPM (Revolutions per minute), since the magnetic heads move along the radial directions of the platters, coupled with high-speed rotation of platters at several thousand revolutions per minute. They are the jumping-off point for the average customer. As a result, the large WD Blue hard drive improves computer performance and allows you to save more files and data. WD Red drives are built for up to 8-bay NAS systems.” The drives are suitable for RAID configurations. The WD Gold series is designed for Data Centers (or Data Centres!) Both WD Red and WD Blue come with large hard drive capacity, but there are also some differences due to different form factors. each were made with slightly differing hardware environment in mind. This post has shown some detailed differences between WD Red and WD Blue. WD Red 4TB NAS 3.5 Inch Internal Hard Drive - 5400 RPM Class, SATA 6 Gb/s, SMR, 256 MB Cache - WD40EFAX 4.1 out of 5 stars 1,130 £96.16£96.16 £97.91£97.91 Get it Sunday, Sep 6 Please note do not install MiniTool ShadowMaker on WD Blue hard drive. Compared with the desktop counterparts, the WD Red is built to withstand the challenges of the always-on NAD environment. However if will all come to nothing if the Hard Drive media you are writing to is unsuitable. This is where WD Purple shines. Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window), Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window), Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window), Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window), Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window), Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window), The NEW QNAP TS-253B 2-Bay NAS for 2017 – More information, UPDATE 2 – The Synology DS1817+ and DS1517+ NAS – Specs, DX517 and more. It designs, manufactures and sells data technology products, including storage devices, data center system and cloud storage services. 2.5 VS 3.5 HDD: What Are the Differences and Which One Is Better? Camera surveillance, and alternative to one drive TB models vs WD Blue up. Hdd series is designed for data Centers ( or data Centres! the. Allows you to save more files and data from the target disk will be HEAVILY used or the. 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