WD Blue or WD Mainstream?

Post Reply New Topic

I'm looking to get a bigger hard drive for my computer, and there's an $8 difference between Western Digital "Blue" and Western Digital "Mainstream". (There's also a matter of availability.)

I'd never even heard of "Mainstream" until I was looking at the Best Buy website today.

Anyone know anything?

Any more, I buy Datacenter quality hard drives. They aren't all that more expensive than regular hard drives and should be more reliable. There are also several other categories available including NAS (Network Addressable Storage)

Also, in terms of failure rates, I may be wrong, but I understand hard drives from HGST and Toshiba tend to have lower failure rates than Seagate and Western Digital. I don't know if that is true for the higher quality drives such as the Datacenter drives.

http://www.knightdale-computer-repair.c ... marketing/

My experience with mechanical hard drive manufacturers is that they're of all over the charts on reliability. I've had WD and Seagate drives crap out after a few years, but I've got a Seagate and a WD in my current build that are both almost a decade old (2008, 2009) and both operate fine. I think it comes down to individual manufacturing runs than the manufacturer itself. I'm much pickier about my memory and mobo, I've seen way too many issues with those two components that I always go crucial/kingston on the memory, and gigabyte/asus on mobo.

Never heard of them.

If I can ever afford it, I want to move towards using SSDs exclusively. Spinning rust is just too slow and unreliable for me.