An ad at newegg got me curious. AS much as possible in layman's words,
what is the difference between Western Digital's black performance
series of desktop hard drives and their gold enterprise series of hard
drives. newegg had a shell shocker deal today for a WD Black 2TB
Performance Desktop Hard Disk Drive - 7200 RPM SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache
3.5 Inch - WD2003FZEX. I continued browsing newegg and ran across a WD
Gold 2TB Enterprise Class Hard Disk Drive - 7200 RPM Class SATA 6Gb/s
128MB Cache 3.5 Inch - WD2005FBYZ offered for the same price.

I know the "black" series is a consumer model aimed at gamers, and the
"gold" series is aimed at the business sector. Both models have the
same capacity (2TB) speed (7200 RPM), SATA (6Gb/s) and form (3.5").
The only difference I can determine between them from the ad is that
the "gold" model HD uses a larger cache (128MB) than the "black
performance" model (64MB).

In the past, I would have expected business (enterprise) level drives
to be more expensive than consumer grade drives because the enterprise
drives needed to be more durable and reliable than the consumer grade
drives. In this instance, they're priced the same. So I'm trying to
figure out which type (black or gold series) makes sense to buy. I
prefer reliability and durability, but I fall into the target audience
for the "black performance" drive.

Shouldn't the "gold" drive work as well as if not better than the
"black performance" drive?. Thoughts about what other issues to
consider?

In terms of what I do on my pc, 95% is email and browsing. The rest is
just playing CRPG games from around the year 2000 - Baldur's Gate,
Morrowind, etc.