WDC Green to Blue rebranding, but externals, too?

[BarkingGhostar]

In the past I had bought internal Green series drives and later the external products which turned out to have Green drives in them. Then late 2015 WCD supposedly rebranded the Green series into the existing Blue series so now I wouldn't know what one would be really getting when buying an internal Blue drive.

My question was going to be if I buy one of their recent external 3.5" drive products (you know, the ones with the colorful cases), will it contain a Blue series drive, a Green-rebranded-to-Blue, or a Green drive. I have had a bad history of the USB interface board failing on their external products, but those external products sold for less than the internals.

So now the Green drives are no more and the external products, for the same capacity, are now slightly more than the Blue internal products. Still, what are we getting. Also, what was the original difference between the Green and Blue internal products anyway--other than a label?

 

[Elixer]

You will not find any "green" drives (basically all 5400RPM) anymore, they have all been merged to "blue" (which were all 7200RPM).
All the current "blue" drives, except for the 1TB versions run at 5400RPM.
The 1TB (internal) blue still is at 7200RPM.

The external units have different firmware (they sleep/park heads faster than the desktop ones), and all of them are 5400RPM, and are mostly "blue" drives, however, there are some of them that have "red" drives in them, and some actually had (still have?) HGST HE drives in them (usually the big 8/10TB ones is what I recall).

Almost all of the externals have the BS hardware encryption on them as well, which basically means that you are SOL'ed if the controller dies on you. You are left with a HD that can't be read, since the damn crypto key was in the controller.

AFAIK, there is no way to tell which drive they are using inside the externals without opening them up and looking.

 

[BarkingGhostar]

I have actually opened up several external drive products. First when a USB controller failed and then another unit to using a working controller as temp surrogate. To date I've had to open four external products (2 2TB and 2 3TB).

Anyway, I was looking at the 10TB Red/Purple non-Business products and shocking Amazon 2-4 weeks before availability. Of course, availability of their Pro (7200 RPM) versions is equally dismal, too.