Hard drive for storage

D

dryfly

Getting the hang of it
May 25, 2015
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I'm slowly piecing together a dedicated computer for VMS. The last thing is to make a decision on a hard drive. I'm partial to Western Digital drives and have read about the Purple series for NVR usage. It's kind of discouraging to read of the high failure rates on these but again, may be overblown. Anyone have experience with the 3 or 4 TB versions of this drive.

The green series is a little less pricey but don't know how it would hold up the 24/7 operation.
 
My vote, which may be worth what you paid--don't bother with the purple if you don't like its price or what you're reading. I have had a couple of cams running now for 10 months recording 24/7 video to some random external USB drives I found. I am sure many people are using whatever the heck hard drive they grabbed off amazon or best buy and doing fine.
 
LittleBrother said:
My vote, which may be worth what you paid--don't bother with the purple if you don't like its price or what you're reading. I have had a couple of cams running now for 10 months recording 24/7 video to some random external USB drives I found. I am sure many people are using whatever the heck hard drive they grabbed off amazon or best buy and doing fine.
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I think you are probably right. I know lots of folks running USB externals and doing fine. I would be concerned about the heat in those enclosures but if they are working that's great. I mostly use the Blue series drives for storage in my computers and external drive cases since they can be picked up on sale.

I've honestly never had an HD failure that wasn't my fault. WD quality control probably is not what it used to be but (knock on wood) mine keep plugging along.
 
dryfly said:
I think you are probably right. I know lots of folks running USB externals and doing fine. I would be concerned about the heat in those enclosures but if they are working that's great. I mostly use the Blue series drives for storage in my computers and external drive cases since they can be picked up on sale.

I've honestly never had an HD failure that wasn't my fault. WD quality control probably is not what it used to be but (knock on wood) mine keep plugging along.
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My externals were either going to this project or to the landfill :) I've had a couple of HD failures in the past two decades that weren't my fault, but more than half were (i.e. hitting my computer while it's writing) :D If I recall correctly the average hard drive starts to have a fairly steep chance of failing around its fourth year, though this varies on use and HD
 
+1 LittleBrother. If it's for a company then get WD Purple, if not then WD Green is just as good in my eyes.

Would rather have WD then the generic no brand no origin crap they bundle with eBay kits.
 
Purples are worth the money.. I have so many drives personally I loose on average 2-3 a year, and Ive already lost 3 1.5TB Seagate's this year, they were some of the last drives from when seagate offered 5yr warranty on everything.. and there way past warranty now.

All drives fail eventually, nothing with moving parts can run forever without being physically rebuilt from time to time.. the firmware on the purples is designed to cope with multiple continuous writes that never end, and while pretty much all forms of spinning rust could handle this task, they will do so with more wear and tear on the internals and higher power consumption.
 
I only have one Purple drive, and it is in an external enclosure plugged in to a directv DVR. Both my Blue Iris machines just use ordinary drives and they are fine. Unless you do 24/7 recording (at high bit rates, too) then I don't see any particularly compelling reason to spend extra on a Purple drive.
 
given the fact that drives today are so large/inexpensive with modern video codecs I see little reason to not record 24/7.. unless your site is operating dozens of cameras or have compliance requirements to retain footage for months and months.

My four cameras recording 1080p or higher at max bitrate and 15fps store 12-13 days of 24/7 footage on a $160 4tb purple..

Not long ago the market used to be upside down and even storing analogue video digitally on hard drives cost a small fortune for any retention, you could spend thousands of dollars trying to archive two weeks of footage from 4 cameras digitally.. but thats not the case anymore, and those tactics are long due to be discarded or only used for special circumstances.

its just my opinion, but everyone should be calculating out space requirements for 24/7 recording now days.. and if you find out later you can get reliable motion recording working then great, you get even more archive than you planned for.. really sucks going the other way, realizing your missing events and dont have enough room to record 24/7.
 
I decided for a little more money to go with a WD Purple 4TB. I don't have any old small SATA drives to use for the OS and VMS software, so what would be the problem with just partitioning off a 100GB partition (using GPT since I have a MB that uses UEFI) and then the remaining 3.9TB as a data partition.

I know it's not ideal but thought I'd try it until I buy a small SATA or SSD. Any big issues??
 
I've had HORRIBLE luck with WD Purples, I changed to Seagate 4TB Surveillance drives and have had ZERO failures, they run cooler, quieter, and are much more stable. IMHO
 
corkangel76 said:
I've had HORRIBLE luck with WD Purples, I changed to Seagate 4TB Surveillance drives and have had ZERO failures, they run cooler, quieter, and are much more stable. IMHO
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Well, got my WD Purple and I too am among the list of failures. I've had lots of brands over the years but WD's exclusively for last 10-12 years. Never had to warranty a drive at all. Now I'm really questioning trying another Purple of just going with one of the Green series drives.
 
That's good info. Unfortunately it doesn't include all drives but at least shows some trends on certain size drives and manufacturers. For the life of me I can't see why there are so many HD failures as evidenced by reviews on resellers websites. Seems like with every drive there are always 30 -50% of the buyers that have trouble. I would think there would be a very quick way for manufacturers to auto-test these drives and pull out the bad ones.

I'm now at a point trying to decide if I want to try for another WD Purple or like corkangel76 go with a Seagate. In the last few years Seagate has had some bad failure rates but with the 4TB surveillance drives looks like your chances are as good.
 
dryfly said:
That's good info. Unfortunately it doesn't include all drives but at least shows some trends on certain size drives and manufacturers. For the life of me I can't see why there are so many HD failures as evidenced by reviews on resellers websites. Seems like with every drive there are always 30 -50% of the buyers that have trouble. I would think there would be a very quick way for manufacturers to auto-test these drives and pull out the bad ones.

I'm now at a point trying to decide if I want to try for another WD Purple or like corkangel76 go with a Seagate. In the last few years Seagate has had some bad failure rates but with the 4TB surveillance drives looks like your chances are as good.
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The user reviews on newegg or amazon cannot be used to determine failure rate as its more likely for a person with a negative experience to post a review than a positive one. Also the way the drive is handled during transport may affect its reliability.
 
Also the backblaze stuff is a bit of a joke. They don't mention that they also use non-manufacturer refurbished drives for a lot of the Seagate stuff.

But the Seagate 3TB has a bad rep elsewhere too, so I would avoid that. The problem with WD Purple is it can sometimes be 2x WD Green and the only difference is the firmware. They both will still have failure rates as they are mechanical. I'd personally rather have 2x WD Green 3TB than 1x WD Purple 4TB in my system for value, redundancy and reliability.
 
fenderman said:
The user reviews on newegg or amazon cannot be used to determine failure rate as its more likely for a person with a negative experience to post a review than a positive one. Also the way the drive is handled during transport may affect its reliability.
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Absolutely agree and true on about every product on most forums. I'm guilty myself. But I gotta say the Purple still had positives about 70% of the time on Amazon and other resellers which included a lot more reviews than Newegg, which is why I still have confidence in it. Another factor to consider on Newegg is if the buyers even know how to initialize and format a drive. There's a lot of first time builders on there.

I really feel it's just the luck of the draw on these drives because I doubt a company could turn a profit having half of what they sell coming back.

Transport has always been a problem and seems to be much better if the drive is shipped with other products in a large box.
 
i was using seagate basic consumer drives and they lasted roughly a year each (i record 24/7). after having two of those go on me, i went with wd reds (they didn't have purples in the store, but aside from some firmware tweaks are essentially the same drive). only had them in for about 6 months but so far so good!
 
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