Surveillance drive: WD Purple or WD Black?

[Jon55]

I'm currently looking to replace the two HDDs in my surveillance DVR, but I'm not sure what to go with. I have 16 HD cameras recording 24/7, and I'd like 3TB minimum.

What I'm not sure about is if WD's Purple drive is all a marketing gimmick or if it's actually worth it. It appears to use their "IntelliPower" RPM speed, which looks to fluctuate all over the place. But playback performance is important, so I'm wondering why I shouldn't just go with a WD Black 3TB instead?

 

[Ivan_Only]

I have not reviewed the specs for the Purple Drive, but even a 5400 RPM drive should not have a problem playing back the video while the drive is also being written to, specially if the Purple drives are in some type of raid array.

 

[Blue Fox]

The purple series like other drives meant for continuous video recording omits error recovery. This means that you don't lose a bunch of footage when your drive encounters an error and stops recording while it tries to fix it. Ignoring errors may sound bad, but a single error will make no discernible difference to your video and is better than no video, so, not a gimmick.

 

[Jon55]

Cool, thanks for the info guys. I'll go with the Purple drives then.