WD Internal Drives by Color

Blue, Black, Red, Purple, Gold, and Green. To most, those words are simply representative of colors on the spectrum, but in the tech world, these colors are used by WD to represent different types of its internal hard drives and solid-state drives. So, suppose you’re in the process of building a computer, populating a RAID or NAS array, replacing a corrupted drive, or simply expanding/upgrading your system’s current storage. How can you tell which color of WD is best suited for you? While it may not be immediately obvious, this article will help break down the function and purpose of each drive, thus allowing you to make more informed decision. Since not all drives are created equal, you wouldn’t want to purchase a drive that isn’t designed/engineered to handle the amount of data you’ll be reading/writing to it, or you’ll be increasing the likelihood of failure. On the other hand, you don’t need a large and expensive drive for basic storage purposes.

WD Blue: The Jack of All Trades

WD’s Blue series is designed for a variety of computing applications. To best handle gaming, HD media playback, or creative software, go with a WD Blue 3D NAND SATA III Internal SSD, which is available as a 1TB 2.5" / 7mm or M.2 2280 SATA III SSD. WD Blue SSDs offer a max storage of 4TB, sequential read speeds of up to 560 MB/s, sequential write speeds of up to 530 MB/s, an MTTF rating of 1.75 million hours, and an endurance rating of 600 TBW.