Hello! Can you please help me to choose the best hdd. I want to buy one 2TB hard drive for storage and gaming and a bit of editing. I can’t pick between Black and new Gold (upgraded RE), like 80% of people telling that you should buy black for gaming since its made for home desktop BUT new enterprise Gold has much better stats and price is just a little bit more…so will WD Gold perform better than Black in my home desktop? It seems more reliable but what about game loadings for example and performance at all also Noise comparison? Thanks!
Stats alone do not tell the whole story. Each hard drive’s firmware has been fined-tuned for specific tasks, and while an all-purpose all-rounder approach is a fair consideration, a WD Gold wold be an overkill.
On the other hand, what do you mean when you say WD Support “removed” your cases?
Anyway why is it overkill when price is almost the same? (difference here is like 3-4$)
So considering that price, is black will be better for home pc? or should I buy gold then?
…so? this forum looks dead
Hi: 123_123
WD black = sata hard drive. (ideal usage is a home computer)
WD gold = sata raid hard drive. (ideal usage is a raid array on a computer or NAS)
Since you are looking at 2TB for storage you might consider a 2TB black or 2 x 1TB gold in a raid 0 configuration. The 2 x 1TB gold will be faster in the raid 0 configuration than the 2TB black.
You may also want to check the reviews at newegg.com for reliability.
NotaCanada
I have only 1 free slot for new hdd and what about noise comparison?
As I said before price in my region for 2TB Black and Gold drives are the same.
Considering Gold has better Internal Data Rate and Buffer Size (not sure how datacenter firmware will act for home pc) it’s still better to buy Black for home gaming and storage?
As for the noise some say its louder than Black some say it’s quieter…
great… wd replied that they don’t even know what’s better black or gold for gaming and storage and sent me to another “support” website etc
“Thank you for your e-mail. I would like to inform you that you are contacting Western Digital support services and we are handling mostly technical issues with WD devices for commercial issues may I invite you to contact the Western Digital Store and WD Online Store.”
And yes it was a TECHNICAL question!..
Overanalyzing? really?..question was simply what’s better, performance in general and noise comparison that’s what I’m interested in, though if it’s gonna be super noisy maybe it will be possible to change it with AAM.
Here are the spec sheets for…
Black Drive
https://www.wdc.com/content/dam/wdc/website/downloadable_assets/eng/spec_data_sheet/2879-771434.pdf
Gold Drive
It becomes funny because as you can see WD throws default hdd’s info instead of an answer once more.
However by checking these sheets it looks like they advertise gold as the best one in everything in wd series.
And 2TB that I’m gonna buy:
Data transfer rate (max) - Host to/from drive (sustained)
Gold: 200 MB/s
Black: 164 MB/s
Cache (MB)
Gold: 128
Black: 64
Acoustics (dBA) - Idle
Gold: 25
Black: 29
Acoustics (dBA) - Seek (average)
Gold: 28
Black: 34
\
Such a horrible support! after creating my case first wd support sent me to wd shop support but they replied that I should ask the first support… I guess if I’ll come in their shop and ask fo consultation they’ll say like ask that guy he probably knows but he’ll say nono ask that guy it’s him who can help you etc xD
I’m planning to buy a Western Digital Gold 1Tb/2Tb for gaming what are your thoughts is it fast/anygood ?
I have two of these in two separate PC’s & both outperforms the WD Black (formerly Caviar Black) as well as WD RE4 (2010 through 2012 SATA-2 versions), of which while I still have all of the latter, some in active use, others as backup drives.
The 2TB WD Gold is the fastest of all, and quiet as a mouse, chances are that if anything is heard, look elsewhere, it’s not the HDD. With a 128MB cache (4x more than any of my others), fast as greased lightning, and just like the WD Black & former RE4, has the industry leading 5 year warranty.
Both of mine were purchased as OEM drives on promo at Newegg, so cost was below that of a 2TB WD Black with the lower 64MB cache, although am sure it’s also a good choice. It’s just that I’m a ‘prosumer’, and not just with HDD’s, also SSD’s, have the Samsung 512GB 950 PRO, recommended for datacenters. The ‘EVO’ line is for consumer use & why just like the WD Black, very few businesses will deploy either.
The way I see things, if a component is certified for datacenter or server usage, will likely last for many years in a Home PC, once out of warranty, will still be an excellent backup drive for a decade, if not longer. That stated, it’s best to have items of importance backed up to two sources, whether another HDD, cloud storage (GMail offers 15GB for free, Amazon 5GB, grandfathered OneDrive customers who opted in up to 30GB (15 of that for Camera Roll), there’s lots of options for extra backup space. Don’t depend on a single drive for backup & be sure to disconnect after every backup or data transfer.
I also keep an internal backup HDD installed, usually a semi-retired RE4, to make a fast backup prior to Windows Update, installing new software or reinstalling the OS. This allows for a fast recovery, although due to the Malware threats of today, it’s inadvisable to rely on an internally installed backup drive, unless can be disconnected once finished, there’s software based controllers for this, although I feel safer by disconnecting the SATA cable.
At any rate, I cannot think of any valid reason why not going with the WD Gold over Black, and especially the WD Blue line, unless one is so cash strapped that only the latter is all one can afford. 128MB cache, 7,200 rpm, close to 200MB reads & writes, 2 Million hours MTBF, low acoustics (some of the SATA-2 WD Caviar Blacks are noisy) & last yet not least, WD’s 5 year warranty with fast turnarounds. I once needed the latter benefit & from the time I initiated RMA to the time I received an (upgraded) replacement was a total of 11 days. Sent in a 750GB WD Caviar Black (SATA-2) & received in exchange a 1TB of the same model line. WD didn’t have to do that, yet they did & that alone meant a lot to me, not so much the drive upgrade as the fast customer service. Note that the HDD wasn’t failing, the SMART tests showed all to be good, and had there been silicone washers installed like now, I may had never noticed the vibration, or could had let it go until there were more warning signs, yet the HDD was only a couple of months old, and that’s within the timeframe to watch for troubles.
Usually, most HDD’s will last less than 6 months before issues, or over 10 years. Since I was within that first window, figured it best to RMA the drive. That’s the type of service that WD gives, whereas their major competitor provides the runaround, I was an owner of one of the infamous Barracuda 7200.11 series from 2009, and no doubt, the memories is still in many thousands of owners minds.
Speaking of which, that’s what I want is peace of mind, and just as my long trusted WD RE4’s, I expect the WD Gold to be even better.
Cat
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My understanding is the BIG difference between Gold and consumer (black and blue) is firmware. Gold is suppose to be used in a raid array. If memory serves the data center drives (gold and the Re series before) do not try and recover data blocks that go bad like consumer drives do. This causes data loss. Normally in a raid the raid controller will detect the bad blocks and fix the problem itself from parity data from other raid drives. If not fixed and it is a critical system file you can experience system instability or even worse total crash. Consumer drives a will try and fix this on there own but there can be pauses or delays when the computer asks for information and it is trying to fix it. In a raid array this pause would make the raid controller think the drive has critically failed and will drop it from the array to not risk corruption. Hope this helps a little, or if someone here knows more feel free to chime in.
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Not a hard core gamer myself, but you may want to consider getting a pci nvme card and an NVME SSD drive. Have one in my laptop and the speeds are insane.
Yes, NVMe SSD are those of today, no longer the future!
Ideally, it would be best to have a 1 to 2TB SSD as the Data drive, for some, this is attainable, for others, we still rely on platters. I’m in the latter group.
Have ran both of my 2TB WD Golds for some time now & have zero issues. IMO it’s an upgraded RE4, faster, a little quieter (really, the RE4 is also less noisy than the WD Caviar Black) & of course backed by a 5 year warranty that few offers for HDD’s these days.
While I cannot argue that the WD Gold are marketed towards organizations with data centers, there’s no reason to think that the Home user gets nothing. For starters, 2x the cache (128MB). Then the rugged construction of the WD Gold, they can’t claim 2 to 2.5 Million hours of MTBF and have weak components.
Like one of the commenters mentioned, in the US, on the Newegg site, the WD Gold costs just a little more (sometimes less on promo) over the WD Black, so I’ll take the prosumer features over those designed for Home use any day of the week.
If one really wants to go cheap, there’s always the WD Blue, although with only a 2 year warranty. So if that drive dies after 3 years, that’s more than the price of purchasing quality from the go & how I look at the overall picture when making purchases in general.
Pair a Samsung 960 Pro with a WD Gold & you have a winning storage system!
Cat
So in theory can I run 500gb gold and 6tb Black in raid 0?
