WD Purple 4TB Surveillance Hard Disk Drive - 5400 RPM Class SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache 3.5 Inch WD40PURX

Pros: specific purposed drive. Came well packaged.

Cons: slightly premium price, but well worth it.

Overall Review: solved some problems I was having with my Zmodo NVR.

OK..so I wasn't using an approved drive, but it did make a difference (this time)

Not reindexing and coming off the bus for a fraction of a second kept the zmodo operating correctly for notifications.

So I'm convinced that using a purple drive for a nvr system is a must to avoid a headache. I mean really. Save $40 and have to take $100 worth of antacid chasing gremlins?

In all fairness to me,I have been using standard drives in my older nvr's without any issues, but these were far less resolution models.

Pros: In speed testing this I used my 20GB RamDrive (read & write speeds @ 5.2GB/sec with a top of the line performance PC win Win7x64 0 minimal bottlenecks) I copied a single large 9 GB file, medium (3-20MB) and small (tens of thousands of tiny 1K files) to and from the RAM drive WD Purple 2TB.I also have enabled write caching in windows, and also turned off write-cache buffer flushing to ensure maximum performance. Inotherwords, you can’t expect to get faster speeds these these:

Write:
Large File: 240 MB/sec*
Medium Files: 154 MB/sec
Tiny files: 38MB/sec

(These tiny file transfer rates are ten times faster than a WD Blue 1TB that I tested last year. TEN TIMES.)

Read:
Large File: 152 MB/sec
Medium Files:114 MB/sec
Tiny files: 4.875 MB/sec

*I am certain you are thinking I am an idiot because these speeds are out of this world fast. And what it is, is the burst write speeds. Fastest HDD I’ve ever tested. And they did it with their insanely fast burst speeds and cache, which seems to be about in real world numbers ~3GB. Meaning if you transfer a file of 3GB or less it literally takes about 3 seconds or 1GB per second for large and medium files are only a little slower. No kidding. I know this drive has 64MB cache, but it’s certainly been tweaked properly for fast read and writes. This skews the real world transfer rate as the first 3GB goes at 1GB/sec and the rest is at around 150MB/sec for write speeds, and 100MB/sec for write speeds.

I do have a 1080P POE color security camera and each camera takes up about one meg of writing per second. This drive claims to be able to sustain 32 such cameras writing to the drive. I do not think these claims are invalid. It should have no problem doing thusly. I am sure other hard drives wouldn’t strain under this demand either.

Cons: Con is the company, their ethics, warranty length, and the price. I study hard drive pricing (sweet spot and biggest hard drive) since 1995, and the three years before the fake crisis (google it) of November 2011, hard drive prices fell an average of 27.06% per year, per TB. Meaning that if while in the Q3 you paid $73.33/TB in 2009, $50/TB in 2010 and $30/TB in 2011, you should be paying about $12/TB now. Here’s the catch, now you’re paying $50/TB, (thus making this drive $100 not $25). As everything in computers gets twice as fast/big for the half the cost every two years or so, doesn’t this HUGE price escalation seem fishy to you? One day soon, the industry, just like the RAM, monitor price fixing cases, the duopoly of WD and Seagate (Toshiba is too tiny of player) will be investigated by the United States Department of Justice, under the Sherman Antitrust. Mark my words. Hopefully you’lll get a check in ten years years after the lawyers get their majority cut for fighting it. So, that’s the propaganda and the state of the industry, (I warned you) So for taking advantage of customers WD, you lose three stars.

So, all hard drives fail, regardless of manufacture, heat, use, speed, thus you find the one you want and get two and Mirror/RAID-1 (or 5) them if your data is of value. Large hard drive storage space is a commodity, Seagate doesn’t store or retrieve your 0’s and 1’s in a fancier manner than anyone else. So raid up or shut up about reliability. You’ll never know how reliable a generation make and model of a HDD was until 5 years after it comes out.

These aren’t built for end user speed, but they have it. They are designed for sustained write for video, and it should do that just fine.

Overall Review: I really don’t know how different WD’s Black/Red/Green/Purple drives are reliability wise. I’d hate to think Black is less reliable and less suitable for anything you’d want to use it for, including surveillance. I think it’s crazy that WD had over a 100% price differentiation in their 2TB lineup. Whatever.

So even though this is an awesome product, one of the fastest mechanical HDD’s I’ve ever tested, burst write speeds are SSD fast for the first 3GB, I don’t like dealing with a company who uses illegal price fixing just to take advantage of the consumer because they can. but what can you do in a duopoly? I also have noticed that “someone” does vote down all negative reviews for WD here on newegg, and upvotes all the positive ones. So I promise you there will be more negative votes for this review than positive, thanks to some small team from WD. I realize how inelastic demand is and you have no choice, so I do recommend this hard drive afterall.