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Is WD Purple good as storage drive?

E

erokube

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Jan 6, 2024
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Hello,
I do have one 4TB WD Purple used as drive for security cameras and I do not have any issues with it in 2-3years.
I would need to check it by few programs, to be 99,99% sure about this statement, as it has no bad sectors etc.
But I need to replace my samsung HDD's , I used for simple photo/movie/backup storage, but not really sure...
If this WD Purple is good for it, as storage drive it does not need to be fast, only reliable in the first place..
And the price is not bad, in my area, 110EUR for 4TB. And around 80EUR for 2TB..
Thank you for any suggestion.
Erik
 
get yourself a cheap SSD.
 
If I recall correctly they are the least desirable (depending on how reliable Blue/Green/??? are that year) of the bunch.

Otherwise what pavle just said.
 
Reliability they are probably better than the faster 7200rpm drives and are designed to be used 24/7 so you may need to disable power saving features that turn off the drive/park heads etc also maybe louder than consumer drives, will definitely not be as fast either, but if it is just for storage and you can deal with these caveats then shouldn't be an issue
 
Ive never used the purple or red drives from WD, but the Purples had some issues years ago when they were first introduced that they fixed. The Red are the more reliable of the two id say, but they both have only 3 year warranties, which is ok. The Blacks are the performance and reliability winners and they have a 5 year warranty because of it. I have a sata2 750GB drive that still works today that i use for backups of my backups. :twitch: Im pretty sure i bought it in 2007...from Tigerdirect, lol.
If youre going to use it for a backup and then put away for a couple months and then do another backup etc... type of thing, then itll probably last as long as youll ever need it, especially at 5400rpm speed, as pavle mentioned, its not under much pressure.
 
I won't mind the speed, I will simply copy paste bunch of data once a while and go away from PC, or even ejoy watching that bar filling up :D

user gets new and new photos, just in case, so user can watch it later, and then the data adds up, but user never watch the old photos again.. Quite strange life of digital photos :D
 
I can't comment on purple, but I've been running a couple of 4TB WD Red drives in my plex server for about 6 years now. They're still going strong, lots of reading and writing to them over the years.

I've also got an 8TB Red, but that one is loud compared to the 4TB.
 
You can get a 2.5" 4TB external WD for the same money. Way better option for backups, especially if you are going to use it for movie storage as well (could hook up the HDD via USB to the router and stream the movies to whatever device you want).
 
I have found 1TB WD elements in my room laying around, I have used it 2.5 years ago, did not power up since then I think, and data are still there, nice.
Interesting thing is, I got it for around 50EUR, now it is around 60EUR, nice inflation.

I think I miss the good old days, when friends around me used to have , for example a whooping 380MB HDD's and my HDD was as large as 2.1GB :D (year 1998)
Two or three 700MB CD's was enough for full (HDD) data backup.
 
Don't purples use SMR, so write speeds are pretty poor in comparison as a result? I think they're intended to be used for storing surveillance video where volume is far more important than performance.
 
I've been using WD Purple drives to store JPG + RAW + MOV files for at least 4 years and so far none of them have died. You can pick up brand new Purple drives on eBay for significantly less than the more popular drives. Speed is not vital for archiving my photo collection and I find Purple drives more than adequate.

I like the fact Purple drives are CMR/PMR and not SMR (shingle), unlike some of the cheaper drives shucked from USB housings. I keep multiple copies of all my files on other machines, TrueNAS RAIDZ2 systems and LTO4 tapes, so if a Purple drive dies, it's not the end of the world.

I stopped using standard Red drives back in 2020 when I discovered WD had obfuscated the fact several drives were SMR and not PMR, which meant re-silvering a FreeNAS or TrueNAS array could take several days instead of a few hours and could end in failure.

https://nascompares.com/2020/04/16/...ves-might-be-using-smr-what-you-need-to-know/

The image below shows the speed of a 4TB Purple drive in one of my machines.

CrystalDiskMark_WD_4TB_Purple.png



The next image is for a 6TB WD Purple disk in the same system.

CrystalDiskMark_6TB_WD_Purple.png



And finally a 4TB WD Elements25 USB3.0 2.5in portable drive.

CrystalDiskMark_WD_4TB_Elements25.png



I find external USB drives run 5 to10C degrees hotter than disks in properly cooled tower cases. I prefer internal drives to USB drives, finding them more reliable and less prone to accidental shock damage. In addition, long poorly made USB 3.0 cables (over 1.5ft/50cm) sometimes cause data corruption with my USB drives and card readers. That's why I stick to short 8in/20cm Startech USB3.0 cables for critical work.
 
I used a WD Purple till recently (The Thermaltake GF1 Killed it), and as a storage drive it was stellar. The model number of my drive was WD40PURZ-85TTDY0. It uses CMR so it is not like SMR based WD Reds. The GF1 also killed my replacement Seagate CMR based pipeline HD (Since then I reverted to my gigabyte p850gm (Fixed, no explosions)). I already got a Toshiba Surveillance 4tb drive on the way as a replacement.

I would readily recommend WD purples as they are all CMR based, and have no problem for large IOPS operations. Don't buy them if they are more expensive than WD Ultrastar DC-HC drives or Seagate EXOS drives,though.
 
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Harlow said:
I've been using WD Purple drives to store JPG + RAW + MOV files for at least 4 years and so far none of them have died. You can pick up brand new Purple drives on eBay for significantly less than the more popular drives. Speed is not vital for archiving my photo collection and I find Purple drives more than adequate.

I like the fact Purple drives are CMR/PMR and not SMR (shingle), unlike some of the cheaper drives shucked from USB housings. I keep multiple copies of all my files on other machines, TrueNAS RAIDZ2 systems and LTO4 tapes, so if a Purple drive dies, it's not the end of the world.

I stopped using standard Red drives back in 2020 when I discovered WD had obfuscated the fact several drives were SMR and not PMR, which meant re-silvering a FreeNAS or TrueNAS array could take several days instead of a few hours and could end in failure.

https://nascompares.com/2020/04/16/...ves-might-be-using-smr-what-you-need-to-know/

The image below shows the speed of a 4TB Purple drive in one of my machines.

View attachment 328512


The next image is for a 6TB WD Purple disk in the same system.

View attachment 328514


And finally a 4TB WD Elements25 USB3.0 2.5in portable drive.

View attachment 328515


I find external USB drives run 5 to10C degrees hotter than disks in properly cooled tower cases. I prefer internal drives to USB drives, finding them more reliable and less prone to accidental shock damage. In addition, long poorly made USB 3.0 cables (over 1.5ft/50cm) sometimes cause data corruption with my USB drives and card readers. That's why I stick to short 8in/20cm Startech USB3.0 cables for critical work.
Click to expand...
To be fair, those numbers are pretty much in line with the kind of performance I see from a WD Red over USB 3.1 on my laptop, at least when it's performing at its best. Although keep in mind that this is including filesystem overhead and any write caching the OS may be doing. The only difference is that a drive half the size will take half as much time to read/write if you're doing something like rebuilding or validating a RAID's integrity.
1704558498342.png

I guess the tl;dr is that for backup, it probably doesn't matter as much if it's SMR or not. You just want something solid.
 
This is 2.5years old WD (external)..
Just for joy of low "mileage" :D
 

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erokube said:
This is 2.5years old WD (external)..
Just for joy of low "mileage" :D
Click to expand...
Newly born baby, good for years to come i'm sure!:rockout:

I am still using a SMR based HDD drive here from WD 8TB, helium filled, it serves me more then 7 years already, and still going strong. It's an WD GOLD Enterprise drive. Not so slow, i will see to put some info from it's speed. It's 7200RPM and has a cache from 256MB.
 
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I've been happy with my Seagate Ironwolf if you want another suggestion.
 
From my understanding, purple is similar to Red with firmware optimization for writing multiple streams of data at once continuously. It would be fine for desktop storage usage, but I'd only do that if it was significantly cheaper than a Red or desktop drive.
 
I have a few 4TB WD Gold WD4002FYYZ Enterprise Class drives and they're CMR not SMR. All the Gold drives listed in the link below are CMR, as I'd expect for expensive server-class drives.
https://nascompares.com/answer/list-of-wd-cmr-and-smr-hard-drives-hdd/#WD_CMR_SMR_drive_list

Some RAID systems are less fussy about SMR drives, but WD Red 2TB to 6TB EFAX drives are not recommended in TrueNAS systems, due to timeout problems during resilvering.
https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/WD-SMR-iX-Statement/

1591637656106.png



On a final note, here is an 8TB Toshiba MG08ADA800R drive from the same system as my 4TB and 6TB Purple drives listed earlier. Higher capacity drives (12TB to 24TB drives can be faster still).

I use these Toshiba drives when first copying 600GB+ of JPG and RAW files saved to NVMe laptop drives and portable SSDs, during a typical 3-week vacation. At a rough guess, I have at least 12 WD Purples (3TB to 6TB) spread over multiple systems, but only two 8TB Toshibas.

CrystalDiskMark_8TB_Toshiba_MG08ADA800E.png
 
I have the WD GOLD WD8003FRYZ, and yes i did not look good, it is CMR and not SMR. But is Helium filled. Good and fast drive, i could buy it at that time for an extremely low price.


Screenshot 2024-01-07 195803.jpg
 
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It's all hearsay, without proper long-term analysis of a sufficiently large sample opinion means nothing. Yeah, I have two WD60PURZ drives, both well above 10000 hours - spun down 98% of the time, but even in this state S.M.A.R.T. counts the time -, does it mean they're reliable? Absolutely not, it just means mine are still working fine. Also a "he says, she says" is what WD says about the "optimization" for a certain workload, since they do not provide any concrete data it might as well be just a colored sticker. They are, at the very least, reasonably quiet, but not as quiet as low rpm "green" drives.
 
HDD's are still the most reliable medium for data storage IMHO. The sound they make... Who cares anyway? It does not bother me at any way.
 
The thread does highlight how badly mud sticks once something gets bad rep.

The current WD Red Plus drives are not SMR. Those are basically the replacement for how the original WD Red were.

WD Purple seems interesting though, as they designed to be run 24/7 in sustained write workloads, I dont see any reason why they couldnt be used as a desktop drive. Dont know if these have vibration sensors though.

Also my opinion on RPM is 5400 is preferable to 7200, its considerably quieter and consumes less wattage. For most use cases that spindles are used for domestically such as media storage or archiving, 5400RPM is easily fast enough.
 
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