Welcome to the WD Community. If you want to maximize capacity and low power consumption, I recommend the WD Green hard drives. Check the link below so you can compare with other models.
personally i only use Black on desktops, and Red in my Synology NAS. WD Black drive is the best performance, useful to have on all the time, but its by no means low power. Green’s are cool/quiet and high capacity.
depends if you have power management set on your system, for shares, then you don’t want the drive spinning down too often. Otherwise go for the Blue (middle of the road).
If you do a lot of sharing, or large files such as movies/tv shows etc (or re-route your family iTunes library), then you might want to look at a small 2 disk NAS appliance to sit on your home network – DS214 series i recommned from Synology and if you get the model with the disks supplied, just verify its fitted with WD Red’s (usually they are).
yes I would say so, those other drives are more geared for Enterprise use/users.
the Black units have never let me down yet – i have dozens bought over the years, and they still work, not had one go bad on me yet.
I have moved up to 1TB Velociraptor (10k spin speed) as my boot drives at home and work now, just wish they did a higher capacity, using 2TB WD Black as secondary drives.