Western Digital Caviar Black VS Blue

You wouldn't notice it unless you're running benchmarking software.

Forgot to add, what could be a tangible difference is the warranty, 5 years for the black vs 2 years for the blue, don't quote me on this though, review if this is true before buying either of them.

Apbg10,

I am also currently trying to decide between 1TB hard drives, but in my case three > Western Digital Black, WD Blue and Seagate Barracuda.

Each has their strong points > In terms of performance, the Seagate -if the 1CH166 version, by Passmark benchmarks is the fastest at 1202 , followed by the WD Black 1161, and then the WD Blue at 1115. The performance of the Blue is very good, but apparently has the slowest access time. It is also said to be very quiet, if that affects your decision, and of course, the Blue is less expensive. Some people say the Blue "feels as fast and in some parameters measures faster than the Black.

As PepitoTV mentions, the difference in speed will probably not be noticeable in everyday use. The Black has an edge in my book because it has a 5-year warranty, the Blue is 2-Year, and if you buy a "bare drive" Barracuda, it may be only 1-year.

However, The complication in this decision is that there is a new version of the Black that's listed, but is not yet being shipped >

Western Digital 1 TB SATA III 7200 RPM 64 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive, Black, WD1003FZEX

http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Cache-Desktop-WD1003FZEX/dp/B00FJRS6FU/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1383006000&sr=1-1&keywords=Western+Digital+WD1003FZEX

> and, like the Blue, the new Black that will have a 1TB platter and given the Black reputation to uphold, may well retain fastest mech'l drive status. The 2TB and 3TB I believe will have multiple 1TB platters and also be very fast.

[This was lucky post! At this point I took off writing for two minutes, won a Quadro 4000 auction, and returned.]

The problem in decision-making is that the WD1003FZEX Black does not yet have any benchmarks or reviews, so it's literally an unknown quantity. The Blue seems to be a great value at about $65 as the new Black at Amazon is listed at $93. The $28 difference at first seems to be quite a large proportion but may be cheaper over the long run. I tend to keep HD's a long while and use them heavily. The WD RE4 500GB- which cost $74 three years ago in my Dell Precision T5400 now has 12,000 hours- that's about 480 days continuous use and has never missed a beat. The RE4 performance is not great, but then again, it's always seemed adequate, internal file transfers are very fast and it reads and writes at about 130MB/s. the other things about mech'l HD's is that STAT II and SATA III will perform about the same as apparently the systems can not produce even the 3GB/s speeds. The RE4 demonstrates to me the problem of using average benchmarks in judging components- over time there will be a few people using the drive in old systems and with full drives that will spoil the averages. This may be why the Blue scores so well- it's a new design and SATA III, so it's going in to newer systems. On Passmark my T5400 system scores 924 for the disk, while the average score for the RE4 is 804. There must be a few people using RE4's in old Pentium 4's!

Reliability is a big issue with me as buying less often means the enterprise or higher MTBF drive will be cheaper in the long run. If the new 1TB single platter WD Black is as good as might be, it would combine great performance with high reliability and I am planning to wait and decide when the numbers come in. Knowing the Black always had a sort of "king of the mountain" reputation, WD probably made sure it's does that again.

I had a Barracuda on order from Amazon but cancelled at the last minute when I saw the new 1TB platter Black listed, but "shipping in 1 or 2 months". There's one 2-star rating by someone frustrated by the listing of an unavailable drive!

Cheers,

BambiBoom

Can I trust blue for programming as well as gaming? Some jerk said that I could not. :x

You can trust blue to be a nice reliable drive with relatively low power cost. Don't go for the seagate drives, their annual fail rate is 3-4 times higher than Western Digital and Hitachi (there is a 17% chance that your Seagate Barracuda will fail in the first year, Western Digital at 4-5%)

I went with the WD Blue 1tb in my build and I've had two friends go with WD Black 1tb in their builds. On average they were getting 120-130MB/s with there blacks and my WD Blue is averaging 140-150MB/s. They have Intel Z77/Z87 boards I'm running AMD 990fx board.

Only limited users, like video editors, make much use of sequential data transfers. The spec most users should look at is 4k Random reads & writes.