WD Combining Green and Blue series drives

[MHLoppy]

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=780

We are making changes to simplify the hard drive selection process for our customers by consolidating our mainstream PC product offerings to only the WD Blue family. All current WD Green capacity, cache and form-factor configurations will remain available through their lifecycle, but under the WD Blue brand*. Although WD Green hard drives are part of a new family, they're still the same reliable hard drive you've grown to know and love over the years.

More info: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products ... d=770#Tab8

It looks like they'll be maintaining the same internals, so hopefully the new blue drives will be as good as the "old" green drives noise-wise.

[quest_for_silence]

It looks like they'll be maintaining the same internals, so hopefully the new blue drives will be as good as the "old" green drives noise-wise.

It looks like a marketing gimnick to hide the fact they are dismissing the development of 7200rpm desktop drives over 1Tb.

[Abula]

For me, its going to be reds only from now on, im confused with the blue/green merge.

[quest_for_silence]

im confused with the blue/green merge.

They are dismissing the 7200rpm desktop drives (pointless/irrelevant in the SSDs era), and at the same time they are going to free up the Red/Purple markets from the Green competition (probably they think the "Blue" brand is stronger than the "Green" one).

[CA_Steve]

I'm holding out for Chartreuse.

[xan_user]

I want my storage to be fuchsia!

[FunkyRider]

Previously the difference between Blue and Green are RPM and "intellipark"

If they rebrand green to blue, will those new blue have head parking issue?

I know you can disable it using WDIDLE3 but it's a hassle to new users and a detrimental behavior to the disks.

[MHLoppy]

They are dismissing the 7200rpm desktop drives (pointless/irrelevant in the SSDs era), and at the same time they are going to free up the Red/Purple markets from the Green competition (probably they think the "Blue" brand is stronger than the "Green" one).

They're still keeping the Black drives around (http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=760) and marketing them as the performance-focused drive, so they're not completely gone.

I'm holding out for Chartreuse.

I want my storage to be fuchsia!

Well they made yellow (Re) and purple drives, so maybe one day

[quest_for_silence]

and marketing them as the performance-focused drive

Exactly: it's a different market segment from mainstream, low cost 7200rpm drives which hegemonized the PC market since about the nineties for more than a decade. PC market is shrinking and declining since a while (see desperate moves like Dell 67 billions acquisition of EMC2), so that's probably a consequential move.

A similar transition already happen in Seagate lineup, silently: the old 7200.14 generation (7200rpm desktop drives up to 3Tb, heir of Barracuda.12 disks) has been renamed as HDD.15 and their 7200rpm drives has already been flanked and will be superseded by newer 5900rpm drives.

So that Seagate will have an high performance drive lineup (SSHD), a mainstream desktop drives lineup (HDD.15) and a more properly storage-centric lineup (NAS and Surveillance): WDC, the only other player in this market, just repositioned their consumer drives in a similar scheme (Black, Blue, Red and Purple).

[quest_for_silence]

If they rebrand green to blue, will those new blue have head parking issue?

Given that any 5400rpm Blue is just a Green with a different label, yes.

[whispercat]

Blue is the new Green?

[k1250]

I will be grabbing a couple of WDEZRX Greens before they finally disappear altogether. WD Greens are well established so I get suspicious when WD say the new "Blue" family drives will be the same, for one thing the Blue drives are now cheaper and I think their quality will suffer as a consequence.