Western Digital HD color differences?

I need some internal harddrives for a RAID 1 system, and I don't know which HD to buy. I'm looking at WD drives, because of their reviews (and my experience with their external drives). I've watched a video that notes the differences of some of their HD colors, but not all of them.

My use for these drives would be for redundant data storage, including prcessed videos/photos, some music, documents, etc. I'm trying to build the quietest PC I can, which I've read the WD Green drives are best for. But I've also read the Red drives are best for RAID, so I'm a bit confused.

For the uses I have for my RAID 1 drives, does the color make a difference? They have Green, Blue, Black, Red, and now Purple? My RAID drives won't be accessed a lot, mostly for exporting edited/rendered files, and general storage (I also have multiple external drives for extra storage).

I'm trying to save some moneu whre I can on this build, so if I can get away with a cheaper drive for a RAID 1 system, I'll use it. But if a cheaper drive means noticeable performance difference or major warranty differences, I'll go with a higher-cost HD.

If anyone has experience with these different drives and their performance, please let me know.

Thank you.

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/internal/desktop/

Personally, I use blacks for everything.

WD sure doesn't overload with information on that chart, do they?

One difference they do not list is the power footprint. I believe the black drives spin at a higher rate to provide higher performance and consequently use more energy. The red (RAID) drives have modified firmware to report errors within a bounded time rather than retry reads that have failed. In a RAID setup it is much better for the drive to report a read error back to the OS since the data can be read and/or reassembled from another drive. If a drive tries for an extended time to reread missing data, the RAID S/W can drop it from the RAID. OTOH in a single drive setup, you do want the drive to retry failed reads until the data can be read or it becomes obvious that that is not going to happen.

I suspect that the drive firmware on the purple drives is tweaked to provide lower latency to reduce the need to buffer video data (or perhaps is built with more on board RAM buffer.) I have no idea what the blue drives are other than "not special in any other way."

I'll get two Red drives, based on the info. Thanks for the help!

HankB said:

I believe the black drives spin at a higher rate to provide higher performance and consequently use more energy.

Click to expand...

Blacks are at the same 7,200 RPM, Raptor/Velociraptors are the only SATA 10,000 RPM HDDs.

(Blacks are the same RPM as Blues and vice-versa.)

In performance it looks like RE > Black > in sequential transfers all other are the same , in random Red/Purple will be faster than Blue/Green ... raptors are waste of money since we have cheaper SSD series on the market.

For home usage you won't see any difference in performance and all will work in RAID. RE/Red/Purple are designed to work 24/7 , all others not. I'm pretty satisfied with Purple series in my NAS. I wanted RE but they're too expensive for my needs while Purple are cheaper than RE or even Red series but still designed to work 24/7.