Is WD Purple good as storage drive?

[SPDIF]

And helium filled drives are also quieter and use less power then air gap HDD. I really do not hear anything from this drive when it's working.
Speeds are not so bad, it's not SSD speed, but still fast enough.

Speed from WD GOLD 8TB.

And CrystalDiskInfo;

 

[chrcoluk]

Imagine how good would be if was helium 5400RPM drives, but sadly all the high capacity ones seem limited to 7200RPM, there is even some 7200RPM drives even marketed as 5400RPM which is funny.

I have a couple of 8TB air 7200RPM drives, had to put the case behind sofa.

 

[lexluthermiester]

Hello,
I do have one 4TB WD Purple used as drive for security cameras and I do not have any issues with it in 2-3years.
I would need to check it by few programs, to be 99,99% sure about this statement, as it has no bad sectors etc.
But I need to replace my samsung HDD's , I used for simple photo/movie/backup storage, but not really sure...
If this WD Purple is good for it, as storage drive it does not need to be fast, only reliable in the first place..
And the price is not bad, in my area, 110EUR for 4TB. And around 80EUR for 2TB..
Thank you for any suggestion.
Erik

The short answer is yes, a WD Purple will do fine as a mass storage drive. However, for the money, a Toshiba 6TB drive would be a better buy. It will give you more space for a bit less money.

get yourself a cheap SSD.

That's a terrible idea. Seriously with that?

There is no cheap 4TB SSD. HDDs are great for storage.

This!

 

[Dr. Dro]

I wish WD brought the 10,000 RPM VelociRaptors back with the amenities and capacity of modern HDDs. These are the best drives I've ever owned, except that they're 300 GB

The thread does highlight how badly mud sticks once something gets bad rep.

The current WD Red Plus drives are not SMR. Those are basically the replacement for how the original WD Red were.

WD Purple seems interesting though, as they designed to be run 24/7 in sustained write workloads, I dont see any reason why they couldnt be used as a desktop drive. Dont know if these have vibration sensors though.

Also my opinion on RPM is 5400 is preferable to 7200, its considerably quieter and consumes less wattage. For most use cases that spindles are used for domestically such as media storage or archiving, 5400RPM is easily fast enough.

I still don't understand the PMR/CMR vs. SMR argument, particularly on lower budget drives such as the Blue and Purple series. I've a SMR 2 TB Blue (WD20EZAZ) that I bought for the singular purpose of storing my Dragon Ball Z anime archive and I only plug it in whenever I'm doing my re-run of the entire series, which I do usually every 6 months or so. It never really seemed to perform differently from any other HDD when moving a large amount of contiguous and reasonably large files.

I suppose it must "suck more" at random access speeds, but tbh if that's paramount, you shouldn't be using an HDD IMHO

Ah I see, exactly as I thought, issues with queuing and random access performance and why my use case of dropping a few hundred files sized a few GB's each sequentially didn't feel like the drive sucked:

How Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) Drives Up Data Center Capacity

How is shingled magnetic recording (SMR) helping the HDD manufacturers drive up storage capacity in the data center?

horizontechnology.com

 

[chrcoluk]

I wish WD brought the 10,000 RPM VelociRaptors back with the amenities and capacity of modern HDDs. These are the best drives I've ever owned, except that they're 300 GB



I still don't understand the PMR/CMR vs. SMR argument, particularly on lower budget drives such as the Blue and Purple series. I've a SMR 2 TB Blue (WD20EZAZ) that I bought for the singular purpose of storing my Dragon Ball Z anime archive and I only plug it in whenever I'm doing my re-run of the entire series, which I do usually every 6 months or so. It never really seemed to perform differently from any other HDD when moving a large amount of contiguous and reasonably large files.

I suppose it must "suck more" at random access speeds, but tbh if that's paramount, you shouldn't be using an HDD IMHO

Ah I see, exactly as I thought, issues with queuing and random access performance and why my use case of dropping a few hundred files sized a few GB's each sequentially didn't feel like the drive sucked:

How Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) Drives Up Data Center Capacity

How is shingled magnetic recording (SMR) helping the HDD manufacturers drive up storage capacity in the data center?

horizontechnology.com

Store once in single drive mode is SMR's optimised best case scenario, so no issues for your described usage, but for something like ZFS its a disaster which is why the fuss got made about the RED's as people were using them for things like ZFS raid pools.

 

[SPDIF]

I wish WD brought the 10,000 RPM VelociRaptors back with the amenities and capacity of modern HDDs. These are the best drives I've ever owned, except that they're 300 GB

What? You ask we run! I still have an old VelociRaptor here at work from 600GB, still works 100 percent okay.

 

[lexluthermiester]

I wish WD brought the 10,000 RPM VelociRaptors back with the amenities and capacity of modern HDDs.

Right there with you!! 6TB or 8TB 10kRPM? Yes please!

 

[chrcoluk]

My 36 gig raptor still works 100% also, and a WD Black 640 gig I brought not long after it (at that time the WD blacks were built to a very high standard).

 

[Dr. Dro]

What? You ask we run! I still have an old VelociRaptor here at work from 600GB, still works 100 percent okay.

View attachment 328838

Yours is a 5th gen HLHX drive, they're about two years newer than the ones I've got. Have 6 of the 300 GB 4th gen HLFS models (they were the highest capacity for this generation, SATA II 3Gb/s with 16 MB cache), there are 4 installed on my rig and 2 are still sealed set aside as spares. I actually have them installed on my PC and I'm running some games off them, this one has Genshin Impact installed on it. I bought them brand new unused from new old stock a few months ago. Lovely drives.

Right there with you!! 6TB or 8TB 10kRPM? Yes please!

Yup! Put a 1 GB cache on them and helium seal technology... it'd be expensive but I would 100% be interested in purchasing one

 

[SPDIF]

Yes i have one of this older ones to, pretty used but still is all working okay. Looks like an older version then yours.

And the speed of this old one;

 

[hat]

I don't see any reason why a Purple drive would be any worse than anything else. The important thing IMO is to not rely on any single drive to store anything of importance. I recommend two for RAID1 (mirrored redundancy) so if one drive fails, you can pop a new one in and restore the array from the one that's left. And then, if the data is important enough, back that up somewhere else, like an external drive, once in a while, as RAID doesn't cover other events such as your motherboard blew up etc.

 

[lexluthermiester]

Yes i have one of this older ones to, pretty used but still is all working okay. Looks like an older version then yours.


View attachment 329344

And the speed of this old one;

View attachment 329345

And for it's age, that is still a reasonable performance. Can we imagine how great it would be with today's advancements?

 

[SPDIF]

Yes for a SATA 300, it's speed surprised me a little. It was the VelociRaptor with it's famous Ice Pack. A small HHD for laptops in a thick aluminum pack for desktop. very heavy.
Where's the time? I had windows XP installed on that time. And also Windows ME if i remember good. Surely i used it with windows 2000. I can't throw it away, it would hurt me for sure.

I will show the speed later of the 600GB version and SATA/600, 10.000 RPM. I am curious myself now... But that speed surprised me a little for SATA/300, some modern HDD even not have this speed at SATA/600.

I will also take a pic from it and post it here.

 

[lexluthermiester]

I will show the speed later of the 600GB version and SATA/600, 10.000 RPM.

My guess is that it will be about 60% to 80% better.

 

[SPDIF]

I remember me, saving money so i could buy one... i was as happy as i could be at that time, really brings a tear in the eye... I was about 20 years old i think.

The fastest HDD at that time, with it's special name VelociRaptor. Did you know about the version that had a visible glass? You could see it actually working.

Found a video from this one!

 

[lexluthermiester]

Did you know about the version that had a visible glass? You could see it actually working.

Oh yes. Have actually seen one. Didn't own it though. I had a 5 drive SCSI320 10kRPM RAID setup at the time so I wasn't as impressed as most. Still very cool looking!

 

[SPDIF]

Okay after work i will post some more about this thing, now i'm surprised myself, unbelievable after all those years.

Okay not on topic, but for whatever reason i did take out my RTX4080 video card and installed my very old GTX 970, would you believe it? Still works a breeze, now i try some games and even CyberPunk works with this. I just wanted to try it again.

 

[Dr. Dro]

Yes i have one of this older ones to, pretty used but still is all working okay. Looks like an older version then yours.


View attachment 329344

And the speed of this old one;

View attachment 329345

Yup! Yours is the earlier revision of the HLFS, and your speeds are consistent with what I get

The good thing about these drives is the data seek time. They're wicked fast for mechanical HDD's.

 

[Jetster]

It's fine for storage

 

[Knight47]

I bought a WD40PURZ in 2018, works fine as storage. On the other hand, the one I got in 2023 is already dead.

 

[P4-630]

5400RPM is easily fast enough.

How long would it take to copy 2TB of Steam games?...

 

[Frick]

How long would it take to copy 2TB of Steam games?...

How often are you doing that?

 

[chrcoluk]

How long would it take to copy 2TB of Steam games?...

Dont know I am not moving TBs of data backwards and forwards.

I will say however much faster 7200RPM is, it would never be worth it to make a one off copy of 2TB slightly faster.

For media/archive 5400rpm is plenty fast, when I actually do want something performance sensitive I use something called an SSD.

 

[P4-630]

How often are you doing that?

Not that often though, but just wondering.

From SSD's to the 5400rpm HDD.

 

[neatfeatguy]

Not that often though, but just wondering.

From SSD's to the 5400rpm HDD.

Going from a 5400 Red to a SSD for a bit over 2.5TB, the estimated time it gave me was 6 hours. I don't know how long it actually took, I just let it run while I went to bed last night.