[H]ot: WD Purple 2TB $79.99 @ egg with code

Remember these are for a very limited market. That market is to be used only inside video surveillance equipment where it okay for the drive to return a bad sector but not okay for the drive to try to spend more than a very small amount of time trying to recover a difficult to read sector. These are basically like red drives with a much shorter TLER (I am not sure if you can change that to make the drive more like a red).
 
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These aren't made for performance, right? They just need to be functional 24/7 I'm assuming?
 
WTF is up with purple? I bet they make these by taking blue drives and kicking them. That's how it works for testicles anyway, take blue ones and kick them repeatedly.
 
The sad thing is the only difference between all these drives
(purple, red, green, blue) is drive firmware.

This is just a money grab ....
 
prometheum said:
purples are designed for storing video like from a security system or a DVR.
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By "designed," you mean, change a couple of flags in the firmware and slap a purple sticker on it?
As someone who does actual product development, it must be nice to be a HDD manufacturer.
 
Ah but which flags to change! And then stability testing. That's the product development.

What type of products do you make?
 
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okashira said:
The sad thing is the only difference between all these drives
(purple, red, green, blue) is drive firmware.

This is just a money grab ....
Click to expand...

Pretty much this! Im guessing you cant reflash the firmware without bricking the drive?
 
I was just commenting on the amount (and randomness) of colors WD has pumped out, really. I seriously didn't know Purple even existed; I thought it ended at Blue, Black, Red, Green (and then their NAS drives which I don't even know if those have colors).

And then there was Purple. Just wondering what the next color choice is going to be.
 
Way back in the day you could user a application to change the TLER on drives but that was taken away and then they started producing the drives with firmware customized for specific uses. In today's market having these drives marketing in this manner makes it easier for less tech savy people to pick the correct drive. The prices aren't that different on the Green and purples.
 
strikerP4 said:
Way back in the day you could user a application to change the TLER on drives but that was taken away and then they started producing the drives with firmware customized for specific uses. In today's market having these drives marketing in this manner makes it easier for less tech savy people to pick the correct drive. The prices aren't that different on the Green and purples.
Click to expand...

One of the still tuneable settings which should make the drives (in some cases) behave similarly is the idle/park settings.

google wdidle3.

There is also a linux utility (yay!) which lets you do this as well. http://idle3-tools.sourceforge.net/
 
Green Energy Efficient
Blue General Purpose
Purple AV recording
Black Performance Desktop
Red NAS
Red Pro NAS with better reliability
Raptor High Performance Desktop
CE AV predecessor to the purple
RE Enterprise Grade General
SE Enterprise Grade Long term Archiving
AE Enterprise Grade Huge storage Long term Archiving
XE Enterprise Grade Hi performance version of the Raptor


I pretty much only use the Red Pro, RE and Raptor in SATA
RE, XE in SAS
 
okashira said:
By "designed," you mean, change a couple of flags in the firmware and slap a purple sticker on it?
As someone who does actual product development, it must be nice to be a HDD manufacturer.
Click to expand...

Sounds like your just bitter you cant buy these cheap purples and firmware swap them.
 
okashira said:
By "designed," you mean, change a couple of flags in the firmware and slap a purple sticker on it?
As someone who does actual product development, it must be nice to be a HDD manufacturer.
Click to expand...

I have seen the computer chips used in Western Digital drives during development. I have seen units that could not pass certain parameters at upper and lower temperature limits. Rather then scrap these units, they would simply redirect them to different product lines.

Not unheard of by any means, after all it's the same idea as "binning" that Intel and AMD does.

But still opened my eyes none the less.
 
I took a look at the idle/park settings on my purple & red drives last night under linux.

The purple had idle parking disabled. The 3 reds I had were, IIRC 180 seconds for two and 60 for the other...?

I disabled it on those as well.

Meanwhile I wasn't able to hit the green drive I have before it killed itself (less than a year)

Edit: Thinking of changing my fileserver name to "rainbow"
 
Would this be a good drive for recording gameplay to? I know you guys said for security cameras, not sure the difference between that and recording gameplay.
 
Purple? This will be great for my sister. She picks sports teams based on jersey colors, now she can pick internal hard drives by color too! WD is really appealing to the fashion conscious PC builder with this rainbow of marketing bullcrap.
 
outers said:
Would this be a good drive for recording gameplay to? I know you guys said for security cameras, not sure the difference between that and recording gameplay.
Click to expand...

What they are saying is that for video, which is a stream of information, 1 or 2 bits being out of place is not critical. A couple pixels being off or some tearing for a split second is not as bad having actual data files get messed up.

Security cameras are a "known" market for this type of requirement. All security systems that use hard drives use the hard drives for the same thing. People recording game play video isn't really a market you can cater to on a mass scale, but they are the same requirements.
 
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