Quote:
Originally Posted by
Mfusick 
Mostly because the black is a pig.
It's far over priced and its a total pig on energy. It's profile leaves much to be desired.
It's makes its performance using older technology that's beefed up. It still sucks compared to more modern designs and platters.
Black line is old and its garbage. It's not more reliable and it still uses head parking of green. Sure it's faster but it uses way too much energy to do it.
A Seagate 3TB is also fast but its a more modern platter and design and its a lot more efficient with a better energy profile.
I'd say the answer for your question is WD makes the black line still only as a low volume line and makes up for that low volume with increased margins.
I think the only ones that buy black drives are noobs that don't know the real performance metrics and fall for the black line marketing. Black isn't really superior except at consuming energy or selling for a high price. Those are not at the top of my buying factors list of consideration areas.
OK, I'm sorry but this is just wrong. The Black line is for a totally different market where performance (IOps) is more important than capacity or energy usage. The Black is a 7200 RPM drive with much lower access times and random read/write performance than the Reds (or Greens).
See here:
http://www.storagereview.com/western_digital_red_nas_hard_drive_review_wd30efrx
http://www.storagereview.com/western_digital_caviar_black_review_2tb
At 4K random the Black is about 1.5x faster for random writes and almost twice as fast for random reads. Average write latency is ~6ms for the Black vs almost 9ms for the Red. And this is despite the much higher areal density of the Reds. The black is simply much faster at everything than than the Reds, except for sequential transfers.
Now don't get me wrong, for HTPC storage I agree there's no point to the Black, they're way too expensive and their performance benefits will never be realized, in fact the sequential transfer rate benefits of the Reds would be more of a benefit.
However if you need a couple TB of space and don't want to (or can't afford to) go the SSD for OS/apps + spinner for data, then a Black is a much better choice (to have your OS on) than a Red.
It's all a matter of the right tool for the job. The Red is the right choice for mass data storage where random access performance isn't important, while the Black is the right choice when you need a relatively large amount of storage but good random access performance.
