6 TB Hard Drive Round-Up: WD Red, WD Green, Seagate Enterprise

Name: 6TB Hard Drive Roundup
Brand: 6TB

by Josh Norem — Monday, December 29, 2014, 11:14 AM EDT

Western Digital Green 6TB

Page 4: Western Digital Green 6TB

The WD Green lineup of drives have always posed kind of a conundrum for PC enthusiasts simply because anything labeled "power saving" is usually "slow," because things need power to go fast. It doesn't matter if it's a CPU, GPU, RAM, SSD, or a hard drive. None of these components reach the top of the benchmark charts by sipping power. Instead they guzzle it, and we generally don't mind. However, when it comes to hard drives, the difference in performance between one drive and another, for the average home user's workload, is usually not as easy to distinguish. And nobody wants a noisy and/or hot hard drive inside their chassis, so bulk storage is one area where even performance enthusiasts we're willing to accept "good enough" most of the time.

It turns out the Red and Green versions of this drive are incredibly similar. In fact, we can't find any difference between them by examining spec charts. Both drives feature a WD "Intellipower" spindle speed, both have a five-platter design, and use 64MB of cache. The biggest difference is the WD Green drive has just a two-year limited warranty compared to the Red's three year warranty.

WD boasts that its Green drive is a performance "leader" amongst 6TB hard drives though, thanks to its power management, high density, and quiet operation. Like the Red drive it's also available in every possible terabyte of capacity, all the way down to 500GB. MSRP is currently $269.99 on this drive, though you can find it for a street price of as low as $250.

The WD Green is essentially the most affordable drive WD sells. Not everyone is looking for maximum performance, or 24-7 operation, or anything special. They just want a drive that is reliable, and doesn't cost an arm and a leg. That is what the Green line of drives is designed to do, in our opinion.