Necessity of surveillance-class/WD purple hard drives and usage of SSDs

[PRC_Save_Me]

Are WD Purple and/or so-called surveillance-class hard drives really necessary in a basic home setup? May someone kindly explain their benefits? Do the optimized firmware and caching algorithms really help reduce any errors/frame loss and "improve playback performance" (whatever that means). What's so special about these optimizations? Do they significantly help, or just at the margins? I mostly see marketing buzzwords and little substances. Could some experienced members share their thoughts on this? Does one see the benefits when you start having using them on 8+ camera setups?

In my home setup, I have 3 Hikvision cameras (for now) that record to a NAS server on event triggers (2 2332's and a 2432 cube camera recording at VBR 6000 kbps bitrate, 1920x1080). At the moment I'm using a 1 TB WD blue and a 128 GB Samsung SSD that was being unused. Any downsides to using SSDs? I only see benefits here, other than storage limitations and costs at the moment. I haven't experienced any sort of errors/tearing/ghosting/frame loss with HDDs or SSDs. In fact, it's seems that it's my SSD that give the smoothest, trouble-free playback.

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I just checked the prices, and a 1 TB Western Digital Purple is only $9 more than a Western Digital Blue. I seem to recall that the price gap was much much larger. Same goes for the Western Digital Red which is dedicated for NAS duty. I only see that the warranty period is a year higher compared to the WD Blues.

 

[Euly]

This is something I'm interested in as well. I have a single 4gb WD purple in an enclosure connected to a Win 10 system for FTP uploads from my Dahuas (Windows sorts the videos for me). I would hope using the drive formatted for NTSF in Windows doesn't negate any benefits the drive might normally have in a NAS/SAN environment. From what I understand about the purples, beyond the bells & whistles, is that the algorithm will help the drive's longevity as it was designed with a specific purpose, rather than for all-around general use.

I'm curious about the use of an SSD for this type of scenario. Before I started using the IVS feature on my Dahuas, the standard motion detection was triggering/writing an average of 40 gigabytes a day. Historically, the two main issues with SSDs were the finite number of writes and the high expense. Even if an SSD will last several years at a lower amount of writes per day, the high expense of replacing it after running it through a multi-year marathon of 24/7 writes would be unreasonable compared to a platter drive, no? I hope some one can educate me on the subject.
I tend to error on the side of caution with my budget, so maybe if I only expect the SSD to last a couple years and it was free or depreciated in some way, then I might use it if it's only gathering dust. But then again, anticipating the abrupt breakdown in 24-36 months would dictate a reasonable response to have a replacement on hand (and presumably, not another SSD, unless money is no object).

 

[Razer]

I wondered the same thing, I have about 400tb of storage total on multiple servers and growing all the time. I used to use WD enterprise class drives and switched to Purple and they have been running great for me so far and I have had no purple drive fail yet. I'm using 3 and 4tb versions. I have had a few enterprise drives fail now, maybe 6-7 of them over 3 years I've been tracking them. What I do now is use an SSD for the OS, and then store the video on the Purple drives. Before the OS and video shard a drive which was bad as when the drive with all the wear and tear from recording failed I lost my OS too.


Recently when building a new server I decided to test the drives, here is a post I made a few weeks ago I'll quote.

"So today I was setting up a new DVR and was able to run some performance data using the Samsung SSD tool. I installed an SSD for the OS, and installed a 3tb WD purple. I then reformatted the original 500gb Toshiba drive and set it up for video storage also.

Running the numbers of course the SSD smoked everything else in a major way, but the purple drive was slower than the basic toshiba OEM drive in all but one important aspect. Write speed. You can tell these are tuned for write speeds in surveillance applications!

850 evo SSD - MB seq read speed 549, write 529, random read iops 96,000, write iops 86,000

Toshiba 500 - MB seq read speed 177, write 212, random read iops 688, write iops 312

3tb WD Purple - MB seq read speed 164, write 128, random read iops 518, write iops 749

The random writes are the important ones for recording video and it is double the performance there, while slower in applications the drive is not designed for. But really I want a monster SSD...... "




So yes, the Purple drives are actually different and optimized for DVR/NVR write duties specifically. I know they are working well for me so far and I see no reason to not use them for the minimal cost difference at this time.

 

[zero-degrees]

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/surveillance-hard-drive-performance,3831.html

People will give several different opinions on this matter - there are several other threads discussing this same topic. Bottom line - the extra features and warranty that is provided with the Purple drives for the minimal cost increase is worth it in my opinion. Do you really want to risk lost frames when you have to review the footage should your house have been broken into? How would you feel then about saving that $20 on a drive...

There is this common theme around these boards a lot of times - I want a "quality" system with great video... but I don't want to spend a lot... Huh... You either want Quality of you want Value - very very very rarely do you get both!

 

[Del Boy]

That's the worst tom's review I've ever read.

Most people will be happy with normal HDD. WD Purple is WD Green with different firmware. Would I rather have Purple yes, would I rather have 2x WD Green instead of 1x Purple, yes, even if not in raid. If one fails the other will still keep recording. All HDDs have failure rates and Purples are no different.

If it's for business, then WD Purple is a no-brainer. For home though, don't be scared by other models. WD Purple is 95% branding and 5% better IMHO.

 

[Git]

What happened to Black and their 5 year warranty - that is what I use?

4TB Black with 5 year warranty - $198
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00FJRS5BA?keywords=digital caviar black&qid=1447445206&ref_=sr_1_6&sr=8-6


4TB Purple with 3 year warranty - $157
http://www.amazon.com/Purple-Surveillance-Hard-Disk-Drive/dp/B00IMPO5OW/ref=sr_1_9?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1447445717&sr=1-9&keywords=wd+4tb

I have had one 2 TB Black fail that was in a mirrored array. WD not only replaced both drives but they gave me brand new 3TB drives for replacement because they didn't happen to have any 2 TB in stock at the moment

 

[PRC_Save_Me]

That's good to hear. It seems like the WD Blacks are the way to go for reliability, I've used WD Blacks for laptop drives for many years but then I switched exclusively to SSDs. It's good to hear WD still offers their 5 year warranty, it must be for a reason (better components and Q/A possibly?).


The Samsung 850 Pro line offers a 10-year warranty. I can't wait for 1 TB SSDs to reach the 200 dollar range.

 

[fenderman]

It's good to hear WD still offers their 5 year warranty, it must be for a reason (better components and Q/A possibly?).

Its likely the components are the same..they simply dont want to warranty a surveillance drive for 5 years because of the heavy use it gets. The extra 40 dollars for two more years of warranty is not worth it. Buy a drive designed for surveillance .

 

[PRC_Save_Me]

Its likely the components are the same..they simply dont want to warranty a surveillance drive for 5 years because of the heavy use it gets. The extra 40 dollars for two more years of warranty is not worth it. Buy a drive designed for surveillance .

So how the usage of SSDs? My Samsung Evo 128 GB SSD drive gives me about 5 days worth of surveillance in my use-case, seems to be pretty reliable.

SanDisk wrote an interesting whitepaper on the topic of where SSDs fit in surveillance systems for anyone interested: http://www.sandisk.com/assets/docs/where-do-ssds-fit-with-security-and-surveillance-systems-white-paper.pdf

They seem to make a great case for SSDs, if you have no issues with short-term storage.

 

[Git]

Its likely the components are the same..they simply dont want to warranty a surveillance drive for 5 years because of the heavy use it gets. The extra 40 dollars for two more years of warranty is not worth it. Buy a drive designed for surveillance .

I don't know all the specs - but for one, the blacks are their 'performance' hard drives and spin at 7,200 rpm and tout features like "Improved Data Protection: Vibration Control Technology (VCT), Corruption Protection Technology (CPT), NoTouch(TM) Ramp Load Technology"
while the green and purples are at 5,400.

Bottom line - whatever works for you and how much your willing to spend. It's nice to know what options are out there

 

[Saurabh3321]

IMO yes a significant amount of colours of WD drives is simply branding. Afterall it's an HDD. However, there are a few differences that warrant the little extra price increase from WD green to purple. Reason? Greens park their head in 8 sec as compared to 300 seconds in case of Purple and Reds. Parking system has a limited life. So for 24x7 applications, purple is I think justified. As far as Red and purple is concerned, I''d decide on the basis of price.
SSD I'd say a NO. SSD have limited life of each cell. Continuous re-writing will wear out SSD quickly. This is the reason why SSDs have still not replaced HDD in servers. Also, SSD become slow if they are full.

 

[Del Boy]

IMO yes a significant amount of colours of WD drives is simply branding. Afterall it's an HDD. However, there are a few differences that warrant the little extra price increase from WD green to purple. Reason? Greens park their head in 8 sec as compared to 300 seconds in case of Purple and Reds. Parking system has a limited life. So for 24x7 applications, purple is I think justified. As far as Red and purple is concerned, I''d decide on the basis of price.
SSD I'd say a NO. SSD have limited life of each cell. Continuous re-writing will wear out SSD quickly. This is the reason why SSDs have still not replaced HDD in servers. Also, SSD become slow if they are full.

WD specifically say don't use Reds for surveillance. (they don't say that for Greens). If it's Purple vs Reds then it's a no-brainer to go with Purple. People have used Reds no problem but YMMV with this stuff.

From now on I'm going to just recommend people spend the extra $20 on Purples even though I use Greens in my own system. Unless you understand what you are doing and why, then spend the extra money. I understand the risks and have 2x HDD in my system so the risk is much lower than 1x Purple.