Hard drive - Purple vs Green

katamara

katamara

Young grasshopper
Feb 20, 2017
46
8
OK, before I get flamed, I know I should be using a Purple drive for the cameras. I will be going with a SSD for the OS and BI software.
But, right now, I already have a extra 2 TB WD Green drive, that I'd like to use to get the system up and running. Most likely for Christmas, I'll upgrade to a 4 TB Purple drive.

In the interests of keeping costs down right now, how bad will it be if I use the Green drive? Is it going to die right away? Will it just be less responsive than if I started with a Purple drive?
 
Do NOT use green drives! They are not designed for 24/7 use and were meant as a cheap reduced power drive with slow varying RPM's.

WD Green is the low-end branch of WD that offered a lower power consumption, a higher storage capacity at a affordable price with variable RPM‘s ( Rotation Per Minute) ranging between 5400-5900/s that caused the Green one’s to crash when used on a daily base. Now Western Digital decided to stir the Green branch into the Blue sector, expanding their line of offer with new models and solutions.Moving forward to the “Green-Blue” WD’s we will stop and look at the “mainstream” branch of WD hard drives. (WD Green is now WD Blue).

At the very minimum I would do the following in order from okay to best - Black, Red, Purple.
 
I have been using WD Green drives for many years for Video storage on my Plex server. While, I've lost a drive because the drive wasnt fully mounted and was knocked off the shelf and it took a 3 foot drop to the floor, other than that, the Green drives have worked fine for me. Is Video Surveillance that much different?
 
I am guessing your Plex server does NOT run 24/7 with the drives actively moving - I am also guessing that the server is not in a constant write state. That is the point really behind the reason to not use a drive designed to be low power, low function, with sleep/shut down functions to conserve energy. Any hard drive can fail, regardless of intended purpose. However, how pist would you be if you have a situation occure that you need to pull video and you have dropped/missing frames, or a corrupt video because you used a drive designed to conserve power in a desktop PC? If so I hope it was worth the $50 savings to not just grab a 1TB purple drive.
 
Greens are shit for raid arrays due to no TLER support as well as high rate of parked heads. Easy way to lose all your files when the raid controller keeps booting it out as failed. If you're recording locally to SSD and just periodically backing up to a green or mirrored greens you're probably ok.


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My plan was to use the drive for a few months, then purchase a proper drive. I'm not expecting this drive to be writing 24/7, as I only want it saving video if there is motion detected.
 
katamara said:
My plan was to use the drive for a few months, then purchase a proper drive. I'm not expecting this drive to be writing 24/7, as I only want it saving video if there is motion detected.
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That's even worse. So now you will have a drive that shuts down to save energy like it was designed to do, then on motion it has to spool up in order to write, then it will shut back down, then power back up, and so on and so forth...

Look, you asked a question, a few people told you why this was a bad idea. If you want to argue why you should be able to use it, you shouldn't have asked the question in the first place.

I'm sure you'll be fine, use the green - it's obvious that's been your intention the entire time, good luck.


I'll never understand these threads where people ask questions because they obviously don't know, but then when people try to provide answers they push back. What was the point in ever asking to start with! :banghead:
 
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Green drives perform ok when recording is continuous and bitrate isn't too high.

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C0m4 said:
Green drives perform ok when recording is continuous and bitrate isn't too high.

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Thanks. I'll try the drive until I can get a better one. I figure worse case the drive crashes, I miss a video of the dog chasing another squirrel.
 
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