Western Digital 4TB WD Purple Surveillance Internal Hard Drive HDD - 5400 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, 64 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD40PURZ

Works great!!!

Being a Fan of Western Digital I decided to give their Surveillance Hard drive a try.. I currently have 9 cameras running constantly at my home to keep my property protected. And I had a 1tb drive on my system and had only 4 days of backup which these days is NOTHING.. I now have one day over 2 weeks or backup.. Totally going to upgrade to a 12 tb once I can get it. worth its weight in gold.. Just remember you're not going to be able to do a visual inventory of your stuff every day but with a good NVR and a large hard drive you will be able to periodically check your stuff and notice differences and catch what is going on. The larger the Hard Drive the better chance you have to keep a good eye on your stuff and have evidence in case of a situation. My situation is odd due to having a multitude of resolutions. Honestly All of my cameras (except 2) are from the Same Manufacture and I love them.. Probably shouldn't mention S3VC cameras but sorry gotta say excellent cameras for any good NVR (AMCREST) My cameras have resolutions from 1080 to 5 mp cameras(oldest camera is 720 ). Including a great camera from FOSCAM (which I didn't know it had audio) So you may have 4 or 6 cameras which most people get Standard resolution cameras (which are fine if your just wanting to see what happened without enough resolution to see who it was in most cases) I go 1080 or higher just so I can get good visuals of who or what happened with better ability to see what your protecting. So in a situation with 6 cameras at Standard Definition you will have at more than a month of recording easy. This drive is designed for Security camera recording and should last longer than a regular system drive. Will recommend to anyone who is in the market to buy a hard drive.

I've used these drives many times and they function extremely well This particular drive is used in a ubiquiti UDM Pro for the protect application and it functions well just a tad loud for this 4 terabyte drive compared to some of the others i've used, but I can live with that. excellent drive drive all around.

Bought this hard drive to add to my Luma surveillance system and it works as expected. With the Luma system it was pretty much just a plug and play set up. So quick and easy I thought I missed a step somewhere. It's recording, though, so all is well. Would have been nice if it came with mounting screws but it didn't (nor was it advertised to come with them). I took two screws from diagonal corners of the existing hard drive to mount this one. The recorder just sits on a shelf so both drives are plenty secure and work fine. You will also need a power cable so make sure you have one on hand. Will order again if needed.

Before reading any review read this: there is a key problem with the way this section is set up. For some reason it lists a very old (2014) model of this drive along with the same New Generation improved model. What makes that bad is that the user comments are both mixed together, so any problems with the original drive appear right on top of the list and may be misleading. It’s very important then to look at the tiny print at the top of each comment and see if the user is talking about the Old Generation style or the New Generation style. To be clear, I am talking about the improved New Generation style. If you are not already familiar with the difference between a general purpose hard drive and one designed for video security let me start with a very basic comparison. This comparison is very broad and not a textbook definition by any means. HOW IT WORKS Computers write and read their information to a hard drive in tiny chunks that are scattered randomly all over the disk, so the recording/playback heads are constantly jumping from place to place. Speed of access in a computer is extremely important. On the other hand video surveillance recorders write and read their information more like an old-fashioned tape recorder, pretty much just like what the cameras are seeing in real time. The recording/playback heads are only required to jump to another spot on the disk when you want to play back an event. So random-access search time is far less of a priority than the non-stop grunt work of recording dependably 24/7/365 without a hiccup. The two processes are entirely different job tasks. COMPARISON: BRAND A VS. BRAND B There are two major brands of specialized video surveillance hard drives. My NVR is one of the most respected out there for users who have a lot of experience and they chose to use the other brand of hard drive. Kudos to them because many other video security manufacturers believe you’ll never know what’s inside so they install the cheapest no-name generic hard drive they can buy. I’ve been buying this brand of security system for years and have been very happy with it and when I wanted to increase my drive capacity from 2TB to 4TB I had no idea if switching to a WD brand drive would make any difference at all. Engineers told me that the two brands are not identical in their design philosophy, each brand considering certain design parameters to be the slightly better way to go. IS THERE A DIFFERENCE Because the NVR software, firmware and other factors play at least as much of a role in performance as the hard drive I was looking to improve these things: 1. Drive noise 2. Drive heat 3. Stuttering (when the image suddenly jumps or drops a few frames, usually on playback) I measured the operating temperature both drives in real-life use in identical conditions using a precision instrument. The original drive was operating at 97.7 F and the WD measured at 91.6 F. That 6 degree difference is significant but not substantial. Likewise I used a calibrated sound level meter for each drive. The original drive came in at 47 dBA. The WD was at 46.9 dBA, virtually identical. The last condition is more difficult to quantify because stuttering is sporadic, so in my opinion I would classify any differences in a typical use scenario as atypical, was I experiencing fewer or more instances of stuttering or about the same? I tried to make my comparison without prejudice for or against either brand because I really don’t care whose name is on it. I bought the WD primarily to double my recording capacity and hence the number of days it would record events. That being said in real-life everyday use I have to lean slightly toward the WD as having fewer instances of jumping, stuttering or frame dropping in my particular system and it does seem to handle a few second backspace more smoothly than the original drive. Maybe another way of putting it is that the WD seems to be playing nicer with the NVR’s software/firmware than the brand the manufacturer originally spec’d. WILL IT IMPROVE MY SECURITY SYSTEM The short answer is not really. Any differences in operating temperature and noise level are too close to be significant and both brands are optimized for video security so abnormalities like stuttering are just that, and are not completely attributable to the hard drive. We can say categorically that the brand or type of hard drive you use will not improve the image resolution (picture quality) of your system. BOTTOM LINE SATISFACTION All things considered the WD is consistently a few bucks more than the other brand and I’m not a big fan of ever paying more if I don’t have to. So based on the few things I could measure and one that I could only perceive I have to say I do like this drive and I believe I made the right choice.

Buen producto

This is the third one of these hard drives I have purchased for my surveillance Network Video Recorders over the last five years. They have all been in service 24 hours a day with no failures. I recommended the same drive to my friend several years ago and his is still working great also. I just wish they came with the mounting screws, it would make installation even easier.

Bought one of these for my surveillance DVR in July 2018 and it was still going strong when the DVR was replaced in November 2022. New DVR had Seagate Skyhawk that died shortly after 2 years so going back to WD Purple.