Caviar Black vs Caviar Blue (same specs)

So I found two HDDs. 1 being the WD Caviar Blue and the other being WD Caviar Black. They have the same specs but the black is more expensive. Why and what is the actual difference if they both have the same specs?

asked Dec 29 '12 at 20:26

SuperZeoX
0●10●11●13

2 Answers:

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The Caviar Black is designed to give the most performance possible at the expense of noise and power consumption. The Caviar Blue is designed to be a typical use drive where performance isn't the top priority. The Caviar Blue is made to balance performance, power consumption, noise, and cost.

With the Caviar Black, you should see much better performance for access times of files. The actual spindle and head of the Black will give much better performance compared to the Caviar Blue, but the actual transfer rates between the two drives will be about the same ~75MB/s.

If you're going to be building a computer, I would recommend getting an SSD (About 120GB) to store the OS and a bunch of apps like the web browsers, office applications, and small games. You could get the Caviar Blue to store all of your documents and games larger than a few hundred megabytes.

The Caviar Black is the kind of drive that you'll want to use if you aren't going with an SSD, but if you're getting an SSD, the Caviar blue will be just as good. Also, by getting the Caviar Blue in this situation, you would likely save some money that you would be using likely for the SSD or other computer components.

answered Dec 31 '12 at 00:36

catchatyou
20.7k●89●165●383

but they both said 7200rpm and 64MB cache. I still don't get it. sorry. and I actually have an OCZ 128GB SSD, a 1TB WDC Black and a 1TB WDC Green. I just saw the blue and black on newegg and was confused

(Dec 31 '12 at 04:38) SuperZeoX

Basically what he means is they are the same specs and price, but they are designed to do different things. One is better at doing something than the other. If you combine them, you can use both of them to your advantage.

(Dec 31 '12 at 09:31) Curtis Coburn

if you have an SSD then go with the WD green, they are cheaper.

The WD black have higher throughput and lower seek times and higher IOPS which offer better performance when it comes to application load times. if you only need bulk storage and no application installs (or at least no IO intensive apps, then you will find it hard to tell the difference between the WD black and WD green (skip the blue in your case unless the blue is being sold for less)

The WD black's performance over the other drives will not really show it's self unless you are doing small read and writes and other IO intensive things, (if you are dealing with just bulk data and not applications then most of your use will be linear reads and writes which both drives will handle well)

(WD black drives also tend t have faster CPU's and higher clock speed memory for better burst transfers in addition to the faster heads)

answered Dec 31 '12 at 05:28

Razor512
15.6k●34●80●242

edited Dec 31 '12 at 05:28

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