WD Black vs Gold (for desktop)

[resistor]

I'm looking to replace an aging 1TB 3.5" SATA HDD in my i7 desktop with a 6TB drive for my data (my system drive is SSD).

I favour WD as I've had no issues with them over the years. Reasonable performance is a consideration, so I was thinking in terms of a 6TB Black.

But I see that WD offer a 'Gold' enterprise device as well which seem similar in spec to the Black. I did a search on here and found some reports that Gold makes more 'clicking' sounds but aside from that does anyone know what the actual differences are between Black and Gold?

Cheers.

 

[EsaT]

Welcome aboard.

If performance is important there are no real differences between HDDs:
They're all dog slow compared to SSDs.
So paying luxury isn't worth it from that aspect.
And data center/server drives are designed to fail to give damn about noise and hence can be noisy for home PC.

 

[M1k3H]

I went for a blue as the extra performance isn't worth it for a data drive. Plus at 170MB/s that is more than enough.

 

[resistor]

Thanks both.

 

[JasonM]

Welcome aboard.

If performance is important there are no real differences between HDDs:
They're all dog slow compared to SSDs.
So paying luxury isn't worth it from that aspect.
And data center/server drives are designed to fail to give damn about noise and hence can be noisy for home PC.

Hi EsaT, I really like your posts, as 99% of the time I agree with everything you say, however this time your wrong sorry.

Those WD Blacks and Gold's are much faster then most regular HDD's. They have very good random access for HDD's also, yes random is much slower than an SSD, but again random on the Golds much better then say a Blue drive.

I use the WD Golds for SQL Server databases, I have 5 of them in my house, 2 older ones, 3 latest ones.

This is my WD2005FBYZ that I just bench marked, along with SSD caching. This is how I run my HDD's.

And this is the same drive without SSD caching, typical consumer HDD's still can't match this speed.