What type of hard drive should I be using? WD Blue? WD Red? Something else?

[loglobal]

What type of hard drive should I purchase for my system's video storage? This will be for a Blue Iris system. I will likely be getting an 8TB drive in order to keep a month of data.

In the 8TB world, there seems to be only two options:

• Seagate Archive @ $240
• WD Red @ $320

The cost difference is not a factor in my purchase decision, nor is it when looking at, say, 6TB vs 4TB or 8TB vs 6TB. If there's nothing wrong with using an 8TB drive, I will be going that route. I have noticed that WD also makes a Blue drive in the smaller sizes. I am just not sure what type of drive is best for my application.

Thanks!

 

[PSPCommOp]

Purple are the ones commonly used.

Current prices on Amazon for their 4-6-8 TB's
https://www.amazon.com/Purple-Surve...UTF8&qid=1474981621&sr=8-5&keywords=wd+purple

5400 rpm helps conserve energy. They are also branded as being specifically for surveillance purposes. While nothing is immune from fail, and you can get a lemon with any brand, lot of people here have used the WD Purple's successfully with no major issues.

Here's a link to the WD website.
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=1210

 

[Brad_C]

Do not under any circumstances try and use a Seagate Archive drive for CCTV. SMR recording is just not the right tool for that job under any circumstances and you'll end up setting fire to the machine in frustration.

WD Red or Purple are a good bet. Both support TLER and play nice for video storage.

 

[HDSecurityInstallers]

WDPurple for the win.

Went from like a 10-20% failure rate within a year with seagate to uder 1% with WDPURx drives.

WDPurple went back and re-engineered the HDD's for 24/7 video storage.
In a nutshell, WD engineers noticed that when recording video 24/7 the HDD needle that writes over the surface would get gunked up and not clean itself off correctly, basically because writing video was so much different then writing data. Some how they re-engineered the HDD's to prevent that gunk up, used the creme of the crop parts for the hdd's and now you have purple hdd's that are insanely better.
You definitely get what you pay for.

 

[AlpineWatch]

the HDD needle that writes over the surface would get gunked up and not clean itself off correctly, basically because writing video was so much different then writing data. Some how they re-engineered the HDD's to prevent that gunk up, used the creme of the crop parts for the hdd's and now you have purple hdd's that are insanely better.
You definitely get what you pay for.

I'll have to read up on that. Back when I worked for a HD head manufacturer, head 'flew' on the disks and didn't touch but they were coming out with 'tail draggers'.

 

[Brad_C]

I'll have to read up on that. Back when I worked for a HD head manufacturer, head 'flew' on the disks and didn't touch but they were coming out with 'tail draggers'.

Dont bother reading up, it's garbage. The difference between hard drives is minimal, there are minor firmware tweaks to the different lines. It's not until you step up to enterprise drives there are significant improvements to hardware, but no heads touch the media unless landed or crashed.

 

[c hris527]

Do not under any circumstances try and use a Seagate Archive drive for CCTV. SMR recording is just not the right tool for that job under any circumstances and you'll end up setting fire to the machine in frustration.

WD Red or Purple are a good bet. Both support TLER and play nice for video storage.

On my first commercial Install, I purchased a complete system from a local dealer, He used a WD GREEN drive in the DVR and it lasted about a 16 months. I have used the purple drives ever since and have no failures(Probable hexing myself here). Stick with what works

 

[Brad_C]

On my first commercial Install, I purchased a complete system from a local dealer, He used a WD GREEN drive in the DVR and it lasted about a 16 months. I have used the purple drives ever since and have no failures(Probable hexing myself here). Stick with what works

No real surprise. Greens follow the same bathtub curve as any other drive, they just seem to have an anecdotally higher failure rate. Having said that, of the 10 Green drives I put into service 5 years & 171 days ago, 7 of them are still running flawlessly. Again, nothing but an anecdote. The other 3 were replaced. All 3 started to grow defects within 2 years of use. I stopped buying greens about 3 years ago (my oldest Red in service is 3 years, 76 days and the youngest Green is 3 years, 255 days).

The Reds and Purples share the same chassis & hardware, it's a small firmware difference. The Greens (now blues) are built to a slightly cheaper spec and slightly more prone to failure in theory. My experience has been keep them spinning and keep them under about 40C and you'll get the best out of any drive.

I do wonder about the higher failure rate of greens being related to people using them because they are cheap, in cheap systems and uncontrolled environments. In those systems you'd probably see similar failure rates on any drives. If your local dealer is selling Green drives for DVR use you should be looking elsewhere

 

[nayr]

after manufacturing the platters are analyzed and quality is determined.. the ones with the least amount of defects/flaws are ranked higher and go into the largest and most expensive drives, and the budget lines scrape out of whatever is left.. thus its no surprise the cheapest drives have the highest failure rates.

red/purple are physically identical and use the same grade of medium, the firmware is merely optimized to prioritize simultaneous writes to prevent frame loss vs normal workloads that reds will see.. this is very likely to also help w/longevity as continuously writing and rewriting is quite abusive. Its worth the extra couple bucks for WD Purple line in your NVR..

If you have a drive already in hand, use it.. eventually it'll need replaced, and prices will be more in your favor then (unless godzilla or something again)

Many years back Seagate fired the CEO, Dropped the 5yr Warranty on all models, Lowered quality control standards, made returns/warranty work more difficult and completely burned there good name and reputation.. screw em *spit*

 

[LeeZ]

Hi ipcamtalk community,

If I'm using a standard power Sandy Bridge processor laptop (2nd generation) INTEL CORE i7-2630QM using Blue Iris to record a video feed from 2 dahua cameras, is there difference between recording onto a 2TB WD blue vs a 2TB purple HDD for camera surveillance? I currently have a 2TB WD Blue HDD--Will that be adequate on my system, or is there a significant advantage and/or is it more preferable to use a WD Purple HDD, besides as mentioned above that "The Greens (now blues) are built to a slightly cheaper spec and slightly more prone to failure in theory"?

Thank you in advance.
Lee

 

[c hris527]

Blue is not designed for the surveillance demands, you can use them but they usually will suffer a premature death, stick with the purple.

 

[bigjoe99]

Please provide me with evidence that using a WD drive of a specific color will die sooner if use in a particular iOPS scenario. Otherwise I'm going to take the side of most storage engineers on this matter and consider the power ranger color scheme as a bunch of marketing fluff designed to draw interest in an otherwise dying market segment. Obviously a 5400rpm drive will move data slower than a 7200rpm drive. Frankly I have no idea why 5400rpm drives are even made other than marketing fluff that they are more reliable than 7200rpm drives which again has no industry evidence.

In my experience, which covers supporting tens of thousands of client stations along with countless SAN and local server storage the biggest failure rates I see with local workstation storage occurs with the absolute bottom end consumer drives that are included with generic NAS or USB enclosures. Once you step up a tier to pretty much any mainstream consumer drive failure rates drop to where Backblaze reports them in their reliability statistics. Basically it doesn't matter what drive you buy if it's SATA (and don't intend on mounting several of them on a dedicated RAID card), and the newer the drive the more reliable it is. Any technology that improves the reliability of a consumer drive is rapidly copied amongst all the vendors, the most recent of which is vibration control. The vibration issue is also pretty much irrelevant unless you are running a few dozen drives in a single shelf, no a desktop computer or server with a couple drives.

Drives with long warranties cost more because you are paying for the warranty. The drive is not more reliable.

As for 'enterprise' class SATA storage the term is an oxymoron. Nobody uses SATA with Tier 1 server storage because nobody runs bare metal anymore and SATA can't keep up with half a dozen virtual machines smashing storage at the same time. Want 100ms latency with your SQL server -vs 10-15ms latency? Then use SATA -vs- SAS.

If you want performance then use SSD. If you want absolute online storage reliability then use RAID 1. If you want bulk storage and with decent all around write performance on a budget and in the event the drive does die it's inconvenient but not a show stopper stick to 6-8TB SATA drives which all have about the same reliability stats.

 

[c hris527]

You can use whatever YOU want, If your data is Important to you then buy a drive designed for Surveillance. I'm NOT a harddrive engineer However I can tell you from personal experience that the Blues and Greens failed prematurely. Purple 34/35 still spinning everyday 24/7 2 blue and 1 green 0/3. Most people here are small business and DYI and I would never tell them what hard drive they Should use however so many are using the Purple here with Great results its a no brainer to pay a little extra $$ and have a little piece of mind.

 

[SirVenom]

Can you share your experience in relation to hdd performance in surveilance environments to support your statement?

Enterprise and surveillance are cheese and chalk. Very different. VMs, SAN clusters and servers are irrelevant for this scenario.

Purple drives are the way to go.

Please provide me with evidence that using a WD drive of a specific color will die sooner if use in a particular iOPS scenario. Otherwise I'm going to take the side of most storage engineers on this matter and consider the power ranger color scheme as a bunch of marketing fluff designed to draw interest in an otherwise dying market segment. Obviously a 5400rpm drive will move data slower than a 7200rpm drive. Frankly I have no idea why 5400rpm drives are even made other than marketing fluff that they are more reliable than 7200rpm drives which again has no industry evidence.

In my experience, which covers supporting tens of thousands of client stations along with countless SAN and local server storage the biggest failure rates I see with local workstation storage occurs with the absolute bottom end consumer drives that are included with generic NAS or USB enclosures. Once you step up a tier to pretty much any mainstream consumer drive failure rates drop to where Backblaze reports them in their reliability statistics. Basically it doesn't matter what drive you buy if it's SATA (and don't intend on mounting several of them on a dedicated RAID card), and the newer the drive the more reliable it is. Any technology that improves the reliability of a consumer drive is rapidly copied amongst all the vendors, the most recent of which is vibration control. The vibration issue is also pretty much irrelevant unless you are running a few dozen drives in a single shelf, no a desktop computer or server with a couple drives.

Drives with long warranties cost more because you are paying for the warranty. The drive is not more reliable.

As for 'enterprise' class SATA storage the term is an oxymoron. Nobody uses SATA with Tier 1 server storage because nobody runs bare metal anymore and SATA can't keep up with half a dozen virtual machines smashing storage at the same time. Want 100ms latency with your SQL server -vs 10-15ms latency? Then use SATA -vs- SAS.

If you want performance then use SSD. If you want absolute online storage reliability then use RAID 1. If you want bulk storage and with decent all around write performance on a budget and in the event the drive does die it's inconvenient but not a show stopper stick to 6-8TB SATA drives which all have about the same reliability stats.

 

[looney2ns]

Purple.
I bet @fenderman has several that's been running for years.

 

[Meow92]

You could always get a 1TB SSD for peace of mind.