WD stirs green and blue into pot, comes out with Blue HDDs

WD is abandoning its Green drive branding, moving the Green drive product line into the Blue brand so as to have a single mainstream PC brand.

The WD Blue drives are 3.5-inch jobs designed for desktop and all-in-one PCs with capacity running up to 6TB. They came from the older Caviar and Scorpio Blue lines and rotated at 7,200rpm and 5,400 respectively. The Blue SSHD is a newer and hybrid flash/disk drive for PCs.

WD’s Green drives are slower 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch desktop drives, spinning at 5,400rpm or so under WD’s Intellipower system. They evolved from the previous Caviar Green products.

WD is combining its Green and Blue brands under the single Blue brand, with the higher performance Black brand drives being unaffected by this. Currently-shipping Green models will stay available until the end of their life, but don't expect any new ones.

The overall WD branding scheme is now:

• Gold label for data centre drives
• Red for NAS drives
• Purple for video surveillance
• Black for high-performance desktop and gaming systems
• Blue for mainstream desktops

The idea is to make it simpler to decide which WD drive brand you need for an application.

WD says its new Blue model numbers use the same nomenclature as the prior Green products, but ending with a Z instead of an X. For example, the WD60EZRX becomes the WD60EZRZ.

Although Western Digital is starting to integrate the WD and HGST businesses the brands will stay separate for two years, after which we can expect more brand unification. ®