WD Purple drives in a RAID?

[BHJohnson]

I'm picking drives for a NAS/video capture rack. I'm planning on making an attempt to use used enterprise hardware raid cards, which isn't a great plan but I want to fight inanimate objects. I bought one 2TB each of; WD Red Plus, WD Red Pro, WD Purple, and Seagate Ironwolf. I then benchmarked them all using CrystalDiskMark. The results were pretty much stacked the same as their prices, except the WD Purple being the cheapest was only beaten by the Red Pro. So I'm kinda leaning towards the Purples. They're 25$ cheaper than the Pro's, which over the scale of 12-15 drives adds up. A couple reviews with benchmarks for them in RAID show they don't have any scaling issues. Is there a down side that I'm missing to using the Purples over Red Pluses?

[Electronics Wizardy]

What size of drives do you plan on getting? Id get drives much bigger than 2tb here, Id go like 12tb here.

 

WD purples work fine in raid, won't cause issues. 

 

Id go software raid here instead of hardware raid, use something like zfs or storage spaces. Much more flexable and better at protecting your data.

[shoutingsteve]

WD Purple is a surveillance HDD.  That means it is designed to be written to 99% of the time and read from the other 1% of the time.  Is this what you will be doing with them?

The WD Red and the Seagate ironwolf are NAS box HDDs.  That means 25% write and 75% read.  That is a RADICALLY different design.

They are different.  Choose which is closest to your usage expectations.

 

Let's talk about what you want your final result to be, because if your plan is to have a 25 TB NASbox to store uncompressed video you would be better off going with the NAS drives (and I would say going with fewer drives that are a large capacity).  But you used the word "capture", so I am assuming that you will be writing to this in realtime rather than simply storing finalized video files.

Will you be using this device to hold files that will be open in editing programs, or will you store those locally until you've completed your video processing?

[BHJohnson]

I'm going with 2TB drives for budget. I could in fact just throw 250$-400$ per drive for 12-15 drives at the problem and have a lot of storage, but using 2 arrays at 6-8TB each will give me plenty to work with for now, I can always scale up later, and I'll be using a third array of 4TB drives to act as an in chasis backup for the time being. I was using a 2TB drive as my capture storage, and it was doing fine, so going to 12TB total storage will be plenty for now. I'm not doing a single 12TB drive which would in fact be cheaper, because This is as much a learning experience as anything else, and I just want to try it.

 

I'm not using ZFS or TrueNAS because this will be primarily a video capture/encoding and editing machine, so I want to run Windows natively and not in a VM. I could use Windows's drive array setup, but no. Eventually, the goal is to have a second machine for those mundane non-NAS tasks, and I can just use this machine to run the NAS and whatever network service VM's I feel like implementing. Then a ZFS or TrueNAS setup in a VM is in fact the right answer. But I want to, and I quote myself, "use used enterprise hardware raid cards, which isn't a great plan but I want to fight inanimate objects." I can't fight inanimate solid state objects that just work with no firmware, driver, and UI compatibility issues. I find I learn stuff when I do things, so I don't expect that to go smoothly at all.

 

Also, yes, if I was doing this for professional or practical reasons, you make good points. To get 12TB of storage in 2TB drives, it's 600$ to get RAID 5, not counting controllers. To get it in 12TB drives, it's 450$ for RAID 1. That then gets more relatively cost effective once you have RAID 5 or 6. Software raid is easier to replace drives and expand array volumes. It also makes hot spares easier and more practical, and means you can make a share drive that you don't have to manage through Windows's file sharing system. But this is not for practical purposes. I'm also watercooling the CPU and GPU, in case you had any remaining doubt about what this build is definitely not.

[BHJohnson]

So what exactly is "radically" different about the drive designs? I know their intended purposes, but are the drive heads different, is the firmware different, does it use cache differently, does it prioritize writes over reads to a detrimental point, like what is actually different? I haven't found any specifics about it, just the generic "surveillance vs NAS" that doesn't really tell me much.

 

Yes, for now I'm capturing/encoding and editing on the same machine. I'll have a 1TB NVMe drive with the OS and program files on, so I was thinking of just copying the raw footage onto the NVMe for use as a scratch drive while editing to smooth out the process. Or use a 2TB NVMe if needed. And yes, I will be using either an Avermedia or Elgato capture card to take 21:9 1440p and encode it/pass it through.

[Electronics Wizardy]

54 minutes ago, BHJohnson said:

'm going with 2TB drives for budget. I could in fact just throw 250$-400$ per drive for 12-15 drives at the problem and have a lot of storage, but using 2 arrays at 6-8TB each will give me plenty to work with for now, I can always scale up later, and I'll be using a third array of 4TB drives to act as an in chasis backup for the time being. I was using a 2TB drive as my capture storage, and it was doing fine, so going to 12TB total storage will be plenty for now. I'm not doing a single 12TB drive which would in fact be cheaper, because This is as much a learning experience as anything else, and I just want to try it.

For that budget, you can just get like 2 12tb drives, and then have more usable space, less total cost(less power, less bays needed). And then add more space. I don't see a reason to get tons of tiny hdds here. Shuck externals if you want cheap drives.

 

 

 

What are the prices on the drives?

 

 

If you just want cheap drives to play with, get some used 3tb sas drives on ebay, normally like 40 bucks, probalby better than any of these options in terms of drive quality.

55 minutes ago, BHJohnson said:

m not using ZFS or TrueNAS because this will be primarily a video capture/encoding and editing machine, so I want to run Windows natively and not in a VM. I could use Windows's drive array setup, but no. Eventually, the goal is to have a second machine for those mundane non-NAS tasks, and I can just use this machine to run the NAS and whatever network service VM's I feel like implementing. Then a ZFS or TrueNAS setup in a VM is in fact the right answer. But I want to, and I quote myself, "use used enterprise hardware raid cards, which isn't a great plan but I want to fight inanimate objects." I can't fight inanimate solid state objects that just work with no firmware, driver, and UI compatibility issues. I find I learn stuff when I do things, so I don't expect that to go smoothly at all.

Id use storage spaces, super flexable with raid levels, easy to expand, works with ssds well. Id don't use a reason to use hardware raid here.

 

52 minutes ago, BHJohnson said:

So what exactly is "radically" different about the drive designs? I know their intended purposes, but are the drive heads different, is the firmware different, does it use cache differently, does it prioritize writes over reads to a detrimental point, like what is actually different? I haven't found any specifics about it, just the generic "surveillance vs NAS" that doesn't really tell me much.

SLightly different firmware, but they work like any other drive for almost all uses.