WD Green Power Hard Drives

A coworker asked me, and other than the cache size and power consumption, i wasn’t sure what else to answer… What is the difference between the colors of Caviar drives? I’ve been under the impression it is primarily the power consumption but I have to assume there are other things as well.

Performance. The Black is optimized for performance at the expense of noise and power consumption, the blue is a general use drive, designed to be a good balance of performance, power consumption, and noise, and the green is designed to use as little power and make as little noise as possible at the expense of performance.

I’m having a dilemma of choosing which version of Caviar for storage/backup purposes.

I need a HDD which is stable, durable and can last for a longer time.
I’ll only use this HDD for backing up my important data once a week, which means I’ll just leave it unplug at the rest of the time.

I plan to go for an internal HDD with an external dock, which I think it will be more flexible switching between IN/EXternal usage and getting emergency backup when the HDD encounters any bad sector issues.

For my understanding, a LOW RPM HDD will definitely be more stable than a HIGH RPM HDD. Is it true?

Through my experience, I’ve a 2009 Caviar Blue, which doesn’t has any issue until today, while I have a couple units of Caviar Black 2009 FALS & 2010 FAEX which encountered with some issues (through checking via HD Tune). Beside that, I’ve also used Caviar Green before, but I felt it is slow when the drive turns from idle to active due to the energy saving technology in it? Correct me if I’m wrong.

So, based on my requirement, which version of Caviar suit me most and which should I go for? Green, Blue, or Black ?

Any of those HDD’s will be stable, each are as likely to break as each other. Only difference is price and performance.

Greens – slow, minimal energy savings (nowhere near worth the loss of performance), generally same price.
Blue – Mid-range, average performance.
Blacks – Faster and more expensive.

There are also Red drives, which are a mix of Green and Blue and optimized for mass storage (talking large scale business server stuff). They have no real use in desktops though.