western digital my passport 4tb speed rpms

These are the drives you buy for storing mass media (movies, music, photos) that doesn't require high-speed access and doesn't get accessed constantly. Ultimately, WD Green HDDs are only useful for mass archival storage at a budget. Blue Comparison & The Best HDD for Gaming

Significantly noisier than WD Green and Blue.

Improved endurance in production environments.

A 5-year warranty accompanies the WD Black drive, making for a more tempting option for production rigs and performance computing.

The drive chassis is built to help handle high-speed fan vibration and odd mounting orientation (think: mini-ITX), reducing the chance of read errors and keeping the header in place.įor users hoping to buy 2TB of WD storage on 7200RPM platters, this is the only real performance-class consumer option. WD Black drives use a beefier chassis than WD Blue as a part of their vibration control. WD Blacks operate at 7200RPM and scale to 4TB ($230), making increased capacity one of their biggest advantages over WD Blue. WD Black drives have now been updated to utilize 800GB platters, reclaiming some speed, but are billed more heavily for high-endurance, high-reliability use than for raw speed. Somewhat confusingly, WD's Blue drives recently surpassed WD Black in performance when the 1TB platters were adopted. Performance industries have adopted “black” as a general indicator of a flagship device, including nVidia's Titan Black. Highest density – best cost-to-performance ratio and speed, even over WD Black.Higher speeds – 7200RPM makes it ideal for primary drive and gaming use.The warranty sits at 2 years, less than half of the WD Black's 5-year warranty.

In the event an SSD isn't present, we generally encourage 7200RPM HDDs as the baseline for primary and gaming drive usage.Ĭache for a WD Blue HDD tends to be 64MB, which is more than enough for higher-speed bursted operations consumer HDDs will generally never (or very rarely) utilize >64MB cache.

The Blue drives ship at a maximum capacity of 1TB (1 platter, unless it's an older model) and are always 7200RPM. Higher data density also reduces cost, as a single 1TB platter has a cheaper BOM than multiple platters. This increases raw speed beyond what is possible even on some of the WD Black drives. Due to the density of the disk, the travel requirement on the header is minimized (more data in a square inch, so less movement is required) and seek times are reduced. WD's most recent Blue HDDs use a single 1TB platter, which allows for higher speeds due to its higher data density. Slower speeds that are inadvisable for primary and gaming HDD usage.Higher capacity at a more affordable price.WD Green's primary advantages are regarded as: These issues have been largely resolved with the newer WD Green drives. The RPM for WD Green drives isn't advertised, but it is generally understood to rotate between 5400 – 5900 revolutions per minute.Įarlier revs of the WD Green drive exhibited failure from header disconnects and seek errors, attributed to the variable RPM. In concept, WD Greens were an attempt at affordable archival storage with a variable RPM, theoretically allowing boosted speed during higher load times and an overall lower power consumption. The WD Green HDDs have had a shaky history. WD's general rule is Black > Blue > Green, but it's not always that simple – there are different use case scenarios attributed to each color, and “best” is classified more by the usage than by the color of the label on the drive chassis. The problem with “general rules” in the hardware space is that they lead buyers to believe there's a clear buying hierarchy without regard to use case scenarios. WD Green 2TB Variable RPM HDD ($72) – WD20EZRX.

Western digital my passport 4tb speed rpms