It may seem counter intuitive to enthusiasts who have migrated entirely over to SSDs, but standard spindle-based media isn't on its way out the door anytime soon. Instead the main goals and design priorities of traditional hard drives have simply changed along with the changing market.

Western Digital has effectively evolved in the last few years from a company that has focused upon trying to deliver the absolute fastest drives possible (an achievement now reserved to SSDs) to one which offers a broad range of high capacity storage solutions. Lineups like the Blue and Green series have been consolidated into a ?mainstream? product offering under the Blue designation that hopes to combine extreme capacities alongside affordable prices and good performance. There's also the Red, Red Pro and RE series which cater to NAS environments and the surveillance system friendly Purples. Meanwhile, the famous Black drives continue to strive towards a combination of leading edge (for spindle-based storage) throughput and massive storage space at a slightly higher price point and without the energy-savings technologies of the Blues.