We recently published a more in-depth article regarding the HDD market, so check that out to learn more about current market trends and insights. Platter density has advanced to the point where it just isn’t practical or cost-effective to produce low capacity SKUs. As SSDs can now affordably and competitively fill the low-end storage needs for client PCs, OEMs, laptops, etc., HDD vendors are showing increasingly less interest in this area, meaning production for 500GB products is spinning down. SSDs have continued to displace demand for HDDs, especially so in the consumer segment. The HDD market has made paradigm shifts in years since our last article.
Likewise, the WD Black series has spilled over into the realm of NVMe/PCIe based storage and WD Black HDDs have expanded capacities up to 6TB that’s quite a change from the 4TB flagship model we covered back in 2014. However, the WD Green SSDs are currently unavailable, perhaps due to the global NAND shortage. Starting with the latter, Western Digital rebranded all WD Green HDDs as WD Blue, selling WD Blues under two different RPMs, but recently reentered the SSD market with both. Other changes to the Western Digital rainbow include the expanding of WD Black, and confusingly enough, WD Green brands. With that, the WD Blue brand has expanded to become Western Digital’s most comprehensive mainstream product line-up. This in no small part thanks to Western Digital’s acquisition of SanDisk-another notable development since our last article.
Furthermore, the WD Blue brand has seen the addition of an SSHD offering and SSDs in both 2.5” and M.2 form factors. The WD Green drives have been painted blue, as they’ve been folded into the WD Blue umbrella. As stated above, Western Digital has seriously changed its lineup. Unchanged over the years is Western Digital’s affinity for deferring to colors as to identify products, where other HDD vendors prefer fantastic creature names (BarraCuda, IronWolf, SkyHawk, etc.). Black for gaming), then dig into the new SSDs. We’ll talk about the best drives for each purpose (e.g. We’ve found it fitting to resurrect this WD Blue, Black, Green, Red, and Purple drive naming scheme explanation. In recent years, Western Digital’s product stack as changed considerably, as has the HDD market in general. In this content, we also explain the specs and differences between WD Green vs. Revisiting an article from GN days of yore, GamersNexus endeavored to explain the differences between Western Digital’s WD Blue, Black, Red, and Purple hard drives.