At the Kashmir Function Room at Marco Polo Hotel in Ortigas last Mar. 21, participants were met with a number of drives encased in glass, all with different colors – blue, black, red, purple and yellow.
From as little as 4GB to an unprecedented 8GB, a variety of utilization were presented with each of the colored drives hitting a specific target. “Find your drive. Find your purpose.” is the tagline WD is going with and it is quite fitting.
Mr. Albert Cheng talks about the perpetual requirement that is storage. More and more will always be needed. Each household at the moment approximately has 3.3TB of storage requirement on the average. There’s some insight as to how traffic is being analyzed as well. Global data growth as of 2010 1.23ZB has been accumulated (1ZB = 1B TB) and then by 2020 the projection is 40ZB will be accumulated – around 5TB of data being carried around by each individual. WD has dropped the older color campaign in favor of this new “purpose” campaign for better clarity.
The progression is by means of “uptime” at first glance, but its more on the manner of utilization as well:
Blue [General] is the code for general purpose usage, a computer which does not require response beyond that of desktop pubishing and multimedia.
Black [Creativity] drives are targeted towards power users or workstation class builds where response and speed are very important factors. Performance and capacity is key. It is warmer in operation, runs with some noise, and costs a bit more than Blue at price per Gigabyte.
Red drives [NAS] are fine for network drives with near constant uptimes, only down for maintenance, and occassional access from many users. Red drives are very silent and are compatible with all NAS systems. Intial investment is higher than normal drives because users will generally purchase multiple units for their NAS systems. Performance focus is on reading data.
Purple drives [Surveillance] are for recording utility, these drives will have all of their space utilized with constant writes and rewrites over a number of years. Performance focus is on data writing.
Re drives [Datacenter] in what appears to be yellow/gold color are for datacenters and servers, these are the types of utility where failure is not an option. Secondary to RAID systems, the HelioSeal Tehnology that has been implemented by WD would allow for these drives to run with platters very close to each other allowing for more storage to fit in the chassis.
WD emphasizes that while you can actually use all of them as regular drives on your desktop, using a purpose oriented color coded drive will not give a user all the advantages of the technologies that have been integrated into such.
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