WD purple drive can it be used for storing data?


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Hi All,

 

Strictly WD purple drives are meant for CCTV video storage. I know that.

but...........

I have got many spare WD purple drives in my hardware box.

The smallest size is 2TB and the largest ones are 4TB.

Since they are not fully utilized, can I use them to store data.

Like movies, documents, word files.....etc etc.( files that hardly make changes)

In the future, I may want to use the WD purple drives to store

CCTV video files if I get the chance of installing Shinobi CCTV docker.

 

Thank you.

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As far as I have know, a hard drive is a hard drive.  They all have to be able to store data reliably!  (And, if you really think about it, exactly what makes one type of data unique from data in general!)  The color of the label does not mean that it won't work in a different situation.  Now there are difference in the drive's spec's that mean it might be better suited for one type of application than another.  Spindle speed is one spec that makes drives more preferred for certain applications.  (High spindle speed is preferred for OS system drives while slower spindle speeds are very satisfactory for long term data storage.)

 

I really suspect that the Marketing Departments are the ones who came up with these color label ploys.  You can charge a few bucks more if you can convince folks they need a drive 'designed' to store their particular type of data.

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Cynicism aside, drive model lines can have firmware tailored to different uses, vibration tolerances, MTBF etc.

 

Take the early Green models - the firmware on the drives were tailored to the home user and put energy efficiency as a top priority, but if you tried to use them in a RAID configuration, the lack of TLER would mean the drive could be dropped from the array at the slightest error.

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When I built my Unraid at home, I had a bunch of WD Green drives, they are currently all in my array and so far, I had two defects but could always rebuild the data. They never were dropped, they just had read errors that were corrected on the fly. But of course, I got rid of such disks when the errors started showing.

I also have a Purple disk that was previously used for Video Editing of multiple HD streams (works great for this, but was replaced with a big SSD now). Works very fine, though the random access is a bit slower than with Red drives, this is because these disks are made for parallel streams, not for single access patterns like a RAID does, so they are slower than RED with normal RAID use. The rest is all Red drives since I built the array and bought more disks, and they behave fine, too. Then I have an old Samsung and Hitachi disk, too. I once had two Seagate disks, but both got reallocated sectors, on one disk so much that it started to corrupt files, so I got rid of them. As cache, I have two Samsung SSDs as RAID1 BTRFS.

I can say, it works! Of course, disk speed of old disks is slower than of new disks, but it was cheaper not to replace all the old disks. So currently, Green, Purple, Red, works all! But of course, as @Michael_P says, Red drives are made for RAID with TLER time-limited error recovery. Purple has TLER, too, btw.

 

Some older benchmark: https://www.hwcooling.net/en/test-of-six-hhds-from-wd-which-colour-is-for-you/

But the principle is comparable. Though I have a Gold drive in my desktop, too, and it is not as fast as this benchmark tells with random access... who knows. Nevertheless, the Gold drive is a nice single disk.

Edited by Addy90
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Perhaps, it should be pointed out that Unraid was intended to work with any hard drive ever made.  But different drives will have different levels of actual performance.  (In fact, different size drives of the same model type can have different performance if the bit-densities are different. )  From a quick Google search, it appears that TLER drives were designed because of the way that hardware RAID cards are programmed to react to drive read error correction routines.   

 

It may well be that drive manufacturers do tune their firmware to 'target' certain usage profiles but Unraid basically ignores those 'features'.  If you have a drive in your inventory, you can use it in your Unraid server and it will work.  If you find a real bargain on a (quality) hard drive, it will work in your Unraid system.  Just be aware that bit-density and spindle speed can/will affect the total performance of your server. 

 

If you are concerned about energy usage (some parts of the world have very high energy costs), high performance drives also tend to have higher energy usage than lower performance drives.  And most Unraid users really don't need the higher performance from 7200rpm drives.  The higher performance does not impact the day-to-day usage experience.

 

Hard drives are a very complex Electro-mechanical system and everything is a trade-off as the designer tries to provide the user with the feature set that the user desires most in each particular model. 

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