Choosing new hard drive RPM and cache specs

[Jim I.]

I am planning on adding a second Western Digital Purple hard drive to my Blue Iris server soon and was curious if a surveillance hard drive would benefit from having a larger cache. I see the WD Purple is offered with multiple cache sizes, 64, 138, 256, 512, etc. Also if there is any benefit to going with the 7200 rpm spinner instead of 5400 rpm. I realize they are a little noisier, but that's not a concern for me.

 

[biggen]

Generally no benefit from a 7200rpm drive except those tend to come in larger sizes than their 5400rpm counterparts. But they are also a hell of a lot noisier as you said.

Cache makes no difference either for our use as that is more a benefit for reads and not writes.

 

[garycrist]

Ya' ain't livin' life till ya' got a fleet of 15Ks spinning up! It also sounds
like the lights should dim too!

 

[Jim I.]

The drives with less cache are a little cheaper as well. I didn't think a surveillance drive which is always writing would benefit from a larger cache, so I was surprised to see so many options for cache size when shopping for a WD Purple.

 

[Mike A.]

The 14GB 7200 RPM Purple drive that I got is dead quiet. I didn't turn off drive optimization when I first installed it and it chunked like crazy but after turning that off not a sound with BI running a bunch of cams to it continuously.

ETA: Here's the specifics for mine if you wanted to try to find the same. Don't recall how much cache it has:

Model Name: WD Purple Surveillance HDD
Model Number: WDC WD140PURZ-85GG1Y0
SATA Revision: Gen2
SATA Link Speed: 3.0 Gb/s
RPM: 7200

Was this one with 512K cache:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B082LTQG89