Western Digital 4TB Purple HDD (for desktop data storage am i ok?)

[Jimbo]

So I just went on the bay and I've been hunting for a good sized capacity hdd for storage of my comics and roms collection. So I purchased a 4TB western digital purple (surveillance) sata drive for £30. If course my question is will it be ok to use in normal desktop just for my files. Most of the stuff I've read so far say it'll be fine, just a bit slower but generally they are reliable drives. Any opinions? Any body used these drives before? I'm hoping they will be ok and I might buy a few more and build a dedicated pc with them in just for data.

 

[Armageus]

I wouldn't personally - purple drives have firmware optimised for CCTV.

They don't care if data is written correctly (as missing the odd few bytes of a CCTV stream doesn't generally matter) and in the event of there being a read error they won't try to re-read it to salvage the data, they just discard it and return control to the OS (so that the DVR keeps working rather than locking up waiting for the drive to recover data)

 

[Donnie Fisher]

^^ agreed. I wouldn’t use one for the above reasons.

It’ll likely be ok, but for those times you might get a read/write error, where a normal drive might retry and complete the I/O operation, the purple could ditch it without telling you… resulting in lost data.

 

[Jimbo]

Ive just discovered i already own a WD 2TB purple drive I bought on the MM here. It has a ton of my comic collection on there and ive had zero problems with it. However i value the advice giving above, thank you. I'll still use them but make sure im backed up eleswhere though too.

 

[Snapshot]

The problem with that is that the potential errors have already occurred by the time you make the backup so you're just backing up faulty data.