Hard Drive Preference

Greyblack

n3wb
Dec 3, 2014
27
3
Chicago, IL
Anyone have an opinion on which brand (or type) of hard drive is best for NVR in either standalone or PC format:

Western Digital Purple series or Seagate Surveillance series? Or an enterprise drive perhaps? Something else?
 
I would go with the WD purple...WD seems to be more reliable...enterprise is overkill for NVR's
 
Plus 1 for that.
I've been pleased so far with WD Reds on NAS, and WD Purples on surveillance.
WD have the edge just now over Seagate after their ST2000xxx disasters, so many stories of lost data, though they are fighting back with their NAS and Streaming/Surveillance optimised models. Reputation easily lost / hard to regain.
 
Ive got a 4TB Purple and it works great, definitely buy a surveillance grade device... they are optimized for continuous sequential writes that NVR's use.

Desktop/Enterprise drives do not see such use and are instead optimized to handle random read/write, because in those environments you dont typically encounter a few files consuming all available storage space and being constantly overwritten.

A decade or so a go when the surveillance grade drives first appeared on the market, few realized what they were designed for.. and seeing them cheaper than desktop/enterprise drives people bought them for normal use... and then were horrified with the dismal performance they got in there desktop.
 
Another vote for the purple. I just installed a second 4tb today in a clients nvr where a seagate died in about a year and a half. Now he's sporting two 4tb purples for his four channel dahua system. He'll get close to two months archiving from that. :cool: As I understand it, the purples are optimized for writing and playback while recording- a good thing.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/surveillance-hard-drive-performance,3831.html
 
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Hmm, makes me think about trying a WD drive for my next build, I've never really been a WD user over the years, but a lot of people like them now. I've heard a lot of premature failure stories about Seagate, but I've not experienced them very much myself. I used Seagate drives in the 80s, but then moved to Quantum drives in the late 80s till about 2000, they were bought out by Maxtor, I bought their drives for a couple years, but now have been buying Seagate for the last 10-12 years. I have had 1 premature Seagate failure out of dozens of drives installed. I've never really tried Western Digital, early on they were known to be slow, but a lot changes in 20 years. With a lot of opinions leaning towards WD, the purple drive sounds like the way to go on a NVR PC build I'm planning.
 
I am trying my first a HGST Deskstar NAS: H3IKNAS40003272SN for what it's worth! :)