Tech Nerds Please Read : WD Purple HDDs

[Tarmack]

I'm moving my recording rig over to a 2 drive stripe within the next few weeks. The original plan had been to grab 2 1TB WD Caviar Blacks in Raid 0 with a hardware raid card. However, since I'm ready to go buy the drives I started looking at prices and noticed the Western Digital Purple series drives. They're basically a brand new line designed primarily for video surveillance with anywhere up to around 32 cameras. The price point isn't that much higher than the Blue drives let alone Black, and it seems to me that for game video capture, a drive designed with a better caching system to avoid dropped frames in home security might just be the ideal game capture hard drive.

Any thoughts? Have you done any research or read anything on these drives?

 

[RedFox]

First time hearing about them, after reading about them they do seem perfect for game capture, and the price isn't too bad.

 

[For Fun Gaming]

Since it's a new product line, there's no feedback from end users yet. On paper it looks good, but how is it going to perform in the wild is another question. Personally I'd wait to see how it will turn out, but when you need to upgrade, you need to upgrade. I use regular run of the mill hard drives with raid 5 for security camera footage for 50+ cameras at work, and even those perform just fine. I'm wondering if purple series are much more than a gimmick. Their product data sheet says nothing about RPM other than 'IntelliPower'. So is this performance drive or economy more like green drives, hard to tell.