Hard Drives, Platters, Black vs Blue

[chazus]

In an effort to provide better information for people, I'm trying to consolidate some of my resources.

It's generally considered that as far as HDD's go, Western Digital is preferred, and that the Black drives are 'faster' than the Blue drive. I'm poking around, and I found that information on some of this is really, really scarce, and on a drive by drive basis.

My main concern is with 'useful' speed, and the effects of platters. I'm of the understanding that less platters = faster (in some way) and that the newer 1TB single platter WD10EZEX Blue drive is "nearly as fast" as a Black. Now what "nearly as fast" means is a mystery to me still.

Here's what I have so far, and if anyone has some better resources to refer to, to pin down information, I'd be grateful. This site has a very nice, albeit rather incomplete database of drives and platter information, as well as read heads. It also seems Western Digital's website is skimpy on the nitty gritty of their drives, and I can't seem to find any reference to platters or read heads in their spec sheets, which makes this all the more difficult.

Blue Drives
WD5000AAKX - 500gb - SATA3 - 125Mb/s - 16mb cache
WD10EZEX - 1000gb - SATA3 - 150Mb/s - 64mb cache

Black Drives
WD5001AALS - 500gb - SATA2 - 125Mb/s - 32mb cache
WD5002AALX - 500gb - SATA3 - 125Mb/s - 32mb cache
WD5002AAEX - 500gb - SATA3 - no info - 32mb cache (can't even find this drive existing on WD's website)

I also see "WD5003AZEX" black drive, but again, no info. I'm under the impression that the "WDxxx3" aspect is generational based.

Does anyone have any useful benchmarks comparting 1 Platter, 2 Platter, Black, and Blue drives? Is a 1 Platter Blue better than a 2 Platter Black? I'm mostly concerned with Read performance, but all information is useful.

[Afrospinach]

I'm of the understanding that less platters = faster (in some way) and that the newer 1TB single platter WD10EZEX Blue drive is "nearly as fast" as a Black. Now what "nearly as fast" means is a mystery to me still.

Less platters = higher density data for the same capacity drive = more bits read at the same rpm. There was a bit of a debacle about seagate's 2tb baracuda drives and 3 vs 2 platter drives beings sold through amazon(and everywhere actually) without clear labeling so you did not really know what you were buying unless you did some pretty unreasonable digging and even then you may not have control over the product you receive.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-me...pdp_images_dav some charts comparing the two drives on the 3rd page. I am sure someone has done a more professional job investigating this somewhere but my internets are super shitty right now and I was aware of this beforehand but can't really search.


From the comments because the picture is sort of hard to read:

Thanks, just ran Blackmagic Design benchmarks
W2410FAV: 130/125 (write/read) (3 platter, 0.67tb per)
Z1E18BGG: 187/194 (write/read) (2 platter 1tb per)

I know this is not WD but they both have to deal with the same issue.