Vegalyp

Adding onto that guess: What gets me though is the Enterprise drives are supposed to/expected to also be used with 24/7 uptime but can come with 5 year warranties instead of the 3 year, but at almost the same pricepoint. And my understanding of the tech is that random writes and reads would supposedly add more wear to the platters and read/write heads than continuous sequential reads/writes although I will be the first to admit my understanding may be wrong, so please correct me if that is the case. Edit: Grammar and punctuation

So, the short of the story is that I am implementing an NVR setup for 24/7 recording and am trying to find documentation on HDD's. I know SSD's are amazing, but for an NVR with 24/7 recording, there is no way I can currently afford SSD's with near enough capacity. My issue is in how little documentation and benchmarks exist for Surveillance drives vs NAS/Enterprise drives. I can see that surveillance drives are rated for more write speed over read speed and NAS/Enterprise drives are rated for a balanced approach to read/write speed. But my question is what workload is needed to fully saturate the write speed of a NAS/Enterprise drive to warrant usage of a surveillance drive. Further, the warranty of WD Red Pro and Enterprise drives of 5 years (Current issues surrounding WD aside) surpasses their Purple surveillance drives' warranty of 3 years. Seagate is in the same position with their Skyhawk and Skyhawk AI drives having warranties of 3 years versus their IronWolf Pro/Exos drives' warranty of 5 years. The pricing for the Red Pro/Gold per TB versus the Purple is similar; the pricing for the IronWolf Pro/Exos per TB versus the Shyhawk/Skyhawk AI drives are also similar. In regards to what I have found in these forums, the answers boiled down to the following two comments for the closest fit to what I am asking. But that is contradicted here: And then this article from GN briefly covers WD Purple drives, but not in the depth I was hoping for. He only briefly mentions they have higher cache for write performance: https://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/2796-wd-blue-vs-black-vs-red-in-2017 I want to make clear that I am not trying to call out the above users. Both may be correct and maybe they are talking about different time periods of tech. Maybe earlier Surveillance drives did not perform error correction and newer ones do. I just genuinely do not know what to believe. I'm just trying to find any real reason to use the surveillance rated drives versus Enterprise drives that come with longer warranties because I'm having difficulty finding any appreciable difference between the types of drives. But again, I can't find many benchmarks or documentation beyond what Seagate and Western Digital include in their marketing, which is vague at best and doesn't leave me with any more of an idea than when I began. Can the write throughput of Enterprise or NAS drives really be fully saturated enough to warrant purchasing a drive with a significantly shorter warranty? I hope this is not too niche of a question or that it comes across the wrong way. I genuinely just am trying to find out what difference/advantage there really is to using these 'special' drives beyond what is included in marketing.