Western Digital (WD30PURX) 3TB Purple SATA HDD

[ObelixThe]

Hello.

I am buying a 3 TiB hard disk. I am conflicted between the Purple and Blue WD drives. I will be using it on a streaming pc I keep online 24/7. So the drive will be on constantly with maybe a few hours of rest every week or so.

I just came across a review of a WD Blue 3TB @ Western Digital WD Blue Hard Disk Drive - 3TB LN67745 - WD30EZRZ - Scan.co.uk

Good value but over aggressive power management for 24/7 use

13 December 2015

Good value, but over aggressive power management for 24/7 use.

Nice and quite drive, reasonable transfer speeds for a 5400rpm drive.

Runs pretty cool too, 26deg in my case.

But.

If you have this drive on continually, this drive will eat it's way through its rated 300,000 load
unload cycles in under 2 years, because, as you will hear, "click" every 8-30 seconds "click" it will
unload the head due to the aggressive power management western digital applied to this range.
These are desktop drives and do not need such aggressive head parking. Every couple of minutes would suffice, it's not like desktop users are worried about battery power.
This is just unnecessary wear and tear on the drive.
My load unload count is 4688 after 192 hours. At this rate, in 520 days my drive will be out of warranty due to being over the 300000 mark, as stated in western digitals warranty policy.
That is not even 2 years, which is the warranty length of the drive.
4688/192 = 24 per hour.
300000/24 = 520 days.

CONCLUSION:
If you intend on using your disks for 24/7 operation choose the slighly more costly RED edition which designed for 24/7 use and have a less aggressive power saving schema.
If you turn your PC on/off all the time then you won't need to worry about this.
It's a shame WD have opted for this level of power saving on a desktop drive, hence I rated the drive 3 (average) for quality based on what is essentially a "firmware" issue that can adversely affect the disks "percieved life" and warranty status under continuous operating conditions.
This doesn't mean the drive will fail at 300k load unload cycles, it just means if you do hit this mark before your warranty has expired, technically your drive will be considered past its warranted "wear and tear" value for head parking, at no fault of your own

The review states that the blue drives have a power saving feature. IDK if thats true or not which is why I am asking you guys.

Does the Purple WD30PURX drive have this power saving | head parking issue or not??

 

[R2D2_WD]

Hi ObelixThe,

You are totally right, the WD Purple drives have a power saving feature, called IntelliPower. The Purple line is designed to be used in surveillance recording devices and the IntelliPower keeps the drive cool and working on low temperature and noise levels. To tell you the truth, you may find better gaming/streaming drives among the WD products.
The WD Blue has received firmware updates and right now has no IntelliPower or power saving features. I presume you are talking about the model WD30EZRZ, right? This is a 5400 RPM 64 MB Cache drive, using IntelliSeek system, which may adjust seeking speed to manage power consumption and noise, but this is not the head parking you are talking about.
Check the link below for the spec sheet of the WD Blue.
http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=s71wBX

Since you seek a high performance drive for streaming/gaming, have you considered the WD Black?

Hope this helps

 

[ObelixThe]

Hi ObelixThe,

You are totally right, the WD Purple drives have a power saving feature, called IntelliPower. The Purple line is designed to be used in surveillance recording devices and the IntelliPower keeps the drive cool and working on low temperature and noise levels. To tell you the truth, you may find better gaming/streaming drives among the WD products.
The WD Blue has received firmware updates and right now has no IntelliPower or power saving features. I presume you are talking about the model WD30EZRZ, right? This is a 5400 RPM 64 MB Cache drive, using IntelliSeek system, which may adjust seeking speed to manage power consumption and noise, but this is not the head parking you are talking about.
Check the link below for the spec sheet of the WD Blue.
http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=s71wBX

Since you seek a high performance drive for streaming/gaming, have you considered the WD Black?

Hope this helps

Yes the Blue i am considering is indeed the WD30EZRZ.

The WD black drives are just out of my budget right now. I am also looking at the Seagate Barracuda (2016) drives.

I have had bad experience with Seagate in the past so I am leaning more towards WD. But if the Blue/Purple drives have this power saving feature then they would wear out pretty soon in my system.