I am a big fan of Seagate hard drives. A couple of years ago, Seagate bought Western Digital. Since then the WD brand has changed the naming convention of its hard drives. Now you can get a “Blue”, “Green” or “Black” hard drive all in the same gigabite size, such as 1TB (terabyte).

So what is the difference, well, the “Blue” is the everyday inexpensive model that keeps prices down on parts. It still comes with the WD 3 year manufacturer defect warranty, nothing fancy, just plain and inexpensive. Our example of a 1TB drive will have 32MB of cache RAM and will be SATA running at 3Gb/s (Gigabits per second) and spins at 7200 RPM.

The “Green” drives are specifically more “eco-friendly”, the 1TB drive will have 64MB of cache (double that of the “Blue” model) but run at the slower 5400 RPM (that is how it “saves energy”). It too will be SATA running at 3Gb/s and have a 3 year warranty.

The “Black” drives are made for speed and accessing data, generally they are designed for workstations or light servers. Sticking with our 1TB example, it will have 64MB of cache like the “Green” version but will spin at 7200 RPM like the “Blue” edition and its data transfer rate is 6Gb/s, yup, twice the others transfer speed. On top of all that it comes with a 5 year manufacturer defect warranty.

To give you an idea of pricing.

Western Digital Caviar Blue WD10EALS 1TB is currently $69.99 at www.newegg.com 

Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EARS 1TB is currently $59.99 at www.newegg.com

Western Digital Caviar Black WD1002FAEX 1TB is currently $89.00 via www.newegg.com

So you can now decide which is best for you. Until we meet again, have a virus free week!