What do I lose with WD Red

vrocco

n3wb
May 27, 2018
2
2
Las Vegas, NV
OK I know that Purple is the ideal surveillance hard drive. However, I am building a box to act as an NVR and I have four brand new 4TB Red drives. I'd rather use them than spend $400 on new Purple drives.

What am I losing by doing that?
What would be the recommended configuration for four drives? RAID0? RAID10?
What components would need to be augmented to compensate for the way the drives read/write? Memory? Processor? Video Card? Other?

Thanks in advance.
 
OK I know that Purple is the ideal surveillance hard drive. However, I am building a box to act as an NVR and I have four brand new 4TB Red drives. I'd rather use them than spend $400 on new Purple drives.

What am I losing by doing that?
What would be the recommended configuration for four drives? RAID0? RAID10?
What components would need to be augmented to compensate for the way the drives read/write? Memory? Processor? Video Card? Other?

Thanks in advance.

Wd's product pages can explain.
 
You can use the red just fine.. I would not buy new purple if you already have reds... you Don't need any raid setup
 
What would be the recommended configuration for four drives? RAID0? RAID10?

Assuming you are talking of putting all 4 drives into a single logical drive....

I would not use raid0 if you are looking at doing raid and you expect a single logical drive to survive a single physical drive failure.

this is totally glossing over a lot of stuff. but my fast 2cents.


you should probably read: Standard RAID levels - Wikipedia if nothing else.
 
LOL Thanks......I have a pretty good understanding of RAID levels. I've spent the last 20 years in the IT field, mainly data recovery, forensics, and information security. My question was mainly if I would see a benefit with the speeds that RAID0 offers. Video would be moved off the RAID volume shortly after it was written for long-term storage. RAID10 would offer some redundancy while giving me the write speeds of RAID0. Obviously no one should use RAID0 for any sort of primary storage.
 
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RAID 0 will increase write speed by increasing spindles. However, if you lose either drive it's all gone. IMO if you're hitting a wall with a single spinner you might likely be hitting a wall with other resources. Onboard RAID controllers aren't exactly high performance anyways. I've worked in some businesses where their NVRs are all virtual and can be migrated among physical hosts and use failover storage while others let their data sit on camera SD cards. Storage reliability is up to you...not us. RAID 1 or 10 is pretty bullet proof, but it's an option not a requirment.
 
I'm using WD reds in my NVR for the past couple years with no issues, retired from a storage server when I upgraded its drives to larger capacity, same in my Sky HD+ box too :-)