Hard drive size and brand questions

[nayr]

physically there is no difference between reds and purples, the firmware is what separates them.. its not just continuous write, its multiple continuous write.. the'll start pulling away from reds the more cameras you have saving.

most people would be perfectly fine with RED's in a Residential NVR, its the other way around you have to be careful of.. cant put a purple in a normal PC, you'll just shorten its life span giving it loads it was not designed to handle.. If you have more than ~8 cameras and the entire disk is for camera storage you should be using Purples exclusively IMHO

Reds are nice but I prefer HGST Deskstar NAS for use in a NAS, the price difference is minimal and they are much faster... I'll be buying another Purple here soon tho for my NVR, tha'll bring me to 6x4TB HGST NAS and 2x4TB Purples.. 32TB of spindles and thats not including the few TB in my laptops/desktops uNF!!

My last seagate was purchased back when they did 5 year warranties on everything, once they dropped that I never bought another one.. that was over 5 years ago and there all dead now.. with the WD + HGST Merger now finishing up, Seagate should be very afraid.

 

[JMartin]

Strictly speaking - and maybe our WD member can confirm -
For general info - I suspect your image will likely behave as 2 enclosures.

Depending on the firmware version, the WD Red HDDs have a limit on how many you should place in a single enclosure.
They started at max 5, now at max 8.

The reason for the limit is due to the way that that sympathetic vibrations can build when multiple spindles are running at the same speed in the same enclosure.
This can adversely affect head positioning accuracy and give data errors.
The firmware is designed to recognise when this happens and specifically deal with it.
I'm guessing they have tuned up the firmware some more since the initial release and have been able to raise the limit to 8.

Each of my drives are independent volumes (no RAID or DrivePooling, etc...) on two separate SATA controllers.
My case is huge, and each drive is in its own Hot Swap Drive Tray, and isolated from the others.
Frankly, I don't see how any single drive even knows that the others are present.

So far... never had a hiccup.

In contrast, although I personally have not had any issues with them, I did rotate out several Seagate 1.5TB drives when I upgraded to the 3TB WD Reds.

 

[CoreyX64]

That's exactly how I had read it. Multiplicity is it's leg up over red. However there are two tiers of purple drives. Purple, and Purple NV. Purple is supposed to be used in DVRs, while the NV equivalent is for NVRs. Mine has 4x 4TB purples (the non-NV kind) and it is a 16 channel Hikvision NVR. They work fine. I wonder what the incentive is for the NV drives. Per their site, it can handle significantly more simultaneous streams on paper. So maybe for large scale NVRs (64 cameras) those might be necessary.


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[alastairstevenson]

Frankly, I don't see how any single drive even knows that the others are present.

They don't, and it doesn't matter if they are JBOD or RAID.
It's a mechanical vibration effect, a bunch mounted close together can start to vibrate in unison, making head positioning accuracy more of a problem than it usually is with such tiny tracks.
It sounds like in your enclosure the HDDs are well separated, as opposed to drive bays in a 5 or 8 bay NAS or bay extension for example.

 

[nayr]

yeah those are for like municipal/commercial use where they have hundreds of cameras..

@JMartin thats an an awesome case, very jelous.. I am stuffed full with 6 disks.. my SSD for ZFS cache is just floating inside :X

the controllers on HDD's have multi-axis gyros on them now, just like your smartphone.. great for laptops because it can park heads before it hits the ground, great for servers because they can detect things reaching a harmonic resonance and back off the RPM's.

 

[JMartin]

If the Purple vs. Purple NV is anything like the Red's vs. Red Pro's, it might be that they have a better warranty too.

 

[JMartin]

@JMartin thats an an awesome case, very jelous.. I am stuffed full with 6 disks.. my SSD for ZFS cache is just floating inside ...

I used to have 4 drives each, in two USB 3.0 external enclosures. It worked ok, but I decided to take everything internal and shift over to SATA III, so I sought out the case of my dreams.

Lian Li 343B-XT

It's not sold in the U.S. so I had to buy it in Norway and have it shipped over. I love this case... well worth the cost.
I have 8 fans, two digital 4 fan controllers, and it runs so cool that I only have 4 fans on (blowing on the back of the drives) and then, only at about 1/2 speed.
It's almost silent, unless I fire up all 8 fans to full honk.

 

[nayr]

Lian Li's are fucking awesome, my Hackintosh is in a Lian-Li PC-V2100A PlusII I bought over a decade ago and its still looking great...

luckily I have a server room with racks, so sound is not a big issue.. I just got a cheap-o 4U case and put a few hotswap cages into it... never thought to see what Lian Li had on the market overseas, great work.

 

[JMartin]

They don't, and it doesn't matter if they are JBOD or RAID.
It's a mechanical vibration effect, a bunch mounted close together can start to vibrate in unison, making head positioning accuracy more of a problem than it usually is with such tiny tracks.
It sounds like in your enclosure the HDDs are well separated, as opposed to drive bays in a 5 or 8 bay NAS or bay extension for example.

Understood.


I've got 14 of these, individually mounted in the 5-1/4 drive bays.
They are awesome.

 

[JMartin]

Lian Li's are fucking awesome, my Hackintosh is in a Lian-Li PC-V2100A PlusII I bought over a decade ago and its still looking great...

luckily I have a server room with racks, so sound is not a big issue...

Mine is in my Theatre/Studio, so sound isolation is important to me.
Hence the adjustable fan speeds.

 

[ilikebike]

Greens were discontinued because the market segment for those drives just don't exists any more. Greens made sense in the earlier days when you'd have a modest collection of local music, movies and media. Now, you have pressures on both ends. Most of our media has moved on to the cloud for streaming but those that still do want to have local media have collections that have exceed single drive needs. Greens were being used more in NAS situations they were not well equipped to handle so the Red drive was created to better handle more modern data storage situations.

Reds and Purple drives are similar hardware wise. The firmware is what separates the two. It's not a trivial firmware change however and our testing methodologies are different between the two lines so it's not merely a label change.

Also, if you're a fan of HGST drives then you'll be please to know that they have a lot of cool tech and IP that WD wanted access to and will probably dictate the WD/HGST product roadmap going forward. I don't know any specifics but HGST makes good stuff and has a ton of good will in the enterprise and I don't think WD wants to mess with success.

 

[CoreyX64]

If it's not broken, don't fix it.

I've always used HGST drives for most run of the mill desktop computing. They were affordable, reliable and worked well. Lately I've been going with WD Blues because I was uncertain as to the quality when Hitachi rebranded them as HGST and didn't need the super high performance as black, but you cleared that up as I had not heard of the merger delay. In the case of Samsung and Seagate, the drives in question have shared branding So it's obvious those drives stem from the joint venture, because Seagate made Barracudas, not SpinPoints. Whether WD will do the same with Hitachi is yet to be known, but I've not had any major issues with either, so that doesn't bother me.

That makes a lot of sense actually. With the exception of the 2 NVRs that I played chicken with using greens (both work very well, btw), I've only ever used them as backup drives, only being accessed every 24 hours by CrashPlan. Low IO, lower power consumption, I'm happy.

I never buy into media or marketing fluff because I've been burned many many times. WD markets the drives for very specific and different purposes so it's nice to hear it goes beyond a sales pitch. Anymore that's hard to find in companies, they overcoat the cupcake with too much frosting or sprinkles. Again, most of that comes from bad past experiences. This is very refreshing to hear. Thank you very much for your insight and perspective on this.


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[Stephen Lu]

you can try by yourself, remember read/write at the same time.
reference : http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/howto-linux-unix-test-disk-performance-with-dd-command/

 

[nebo]

While searching for Purple vs. Purple NV, this was the best thread I found to ask.

I only plan to buy two 4TB for home for a 16ch NVR.
So is it wasting $23 each, or might as well go ahead, since I'm not buying in any quantities?
Anyone running the NV version?

However there are two tiers of purple drives. Purple, and Purple NV. Purple is supposed to be used in DVRs, while the NV equivalent is for NVRs. Mine has 4x 4TB purples (the non-NV kind) and it is a 16 channel Hikvision NVR. They work fine. I wonder what the incentive is for the NV drives. Per their site, it can handle significantly more simultaneous streams on paper. So maybe for large scale NVRs (64 cameras) those might be necessary.


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yeah those are for like municipal/commercial use where they have hundreds of cameras..

@nayr were you referring to the Purple NV's?

If the Purple vs. Purple NV is anything like the Red's vs. Red Pro's, it might be that they have a better warranty too.

Looks like they both have 3 year warranties.

I'm leaning towards the NV unless you all feel it may not be proven yet, or overkill for me.

 

[Kawboy12R]

I think Alastair covered why they dumped greens- reliability. Once their reputation was damaged it was better to ditch and replace them completely than repair the problems and soldier on with the damaged rep. I think about the only place the Greens were really good in were external HDs used as backup drives where they spin up, write, then stay turned off most of the time without a kabillion spin up/spin down cycles. They got put in a bunch of NVRs and DVRs and had fairly high failure rates from the anecdotal evidence I've read on CCTV forums. IIRC, WD also used to mention a specific fairly high camera count in their Green literature that they were rated for and that, as you've noticed, they didn't really handle that well. A quick Google search didn't bring that reference to light though. The interesting part is that apparently they almost instantly dumped the Green reference completely and sold their remaining Greens as Blues instead of taking them off the retail market and just using them as external USB storage drives with no mention of colour. Why give someone who wanted a Blue a Green with a different sticker? They could've even sold them to computer builders who sold complete systems and marketed them with no reference to HD colour.

 

[CoreyX64]

While searching for Purple vs. Purple NV, this was the best thread I found to ask.

I only plan to buy two 4TB for home for a 16ch NVR.
So is it wasting $23 each, or might as well go ahead, since I'm not buying in any quantities?
Anyone running the NV version?



@nayr were you referring to the Purple NV's?

Looks like they both have 3 year warranties.

I'm leaning towards the NV unless you all feel it may not be proven yet, or overkill for me.

I have up to 32CH Hikvision recorders packed with 4 4TB Purples (non-NV) and they work incredibly well. Stick with regular purple, you'll be fine. NV is for NVRs with an insane number of channels (something like 64+ where the IO is much much higher)


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[nebo]

I have up to 32CH Hikvision recorders packed with 4 4TB Purples (non-NV) and they work incredibly well. Stick with regular purple, you'll be fine. NV is for NVRs with an insane number of channels (something like 64+ where the IO is much much higher)


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Proven reliability and good experience is hard to beat. Thanks @CoreyX64!

 

[CoreyX64]

Not saying an NV won't work, it just might be overkill for 16. I personally have had no issues with them in any of my recorders from 4CH to 32CH, I can't vouch for others but the general consensus is that purple =


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[Stephen Lu]

I suggest change Disk from purple to purple NV. Purple was easily damaged when in shock.
I had a test to install 9 of 4TB Purple HDD and overwrite these device. This test record rate is 130 Mbps and record around one month.
Maybe I very rude, but after completion of the test I found two hard disk has been damaged.

 

[nayr]

pro tip: when your buying a load of drives, like 9 lets say.. order 3 batches of 3 from 3 vendors.. this way you dont end up with 9 sequentially made drives from the same run, that were transported along the same path and subject to all the same abuses that could cause defects/flaws that make them all die around the same time.

especially if you have any redundancy/raid going on.

130Mbps is not enough throughput to justify NV series, however putting 9 of them into the same chassis without any vibration isolation.. might be enough reason to use NV simply for the warranty if nothing else.

as you start working with more disks your likely hood of failure goes through the roof, ie, you have many times the chance of seeing a failure than say I would with just one of em.

ps: also be careful buying a load of OEM drives, without retail packaging your at the mercy of your vendor to properly package them to prevent damage.. even NewEgg's got flack from OEM drive manufacturers for not adequately packaging OEM disks.. IIRC they come in crates of ~36 disks, so unless you buy that many you'll never get the original packaging.