WD Purple sound quality

[sgr]

Hi,

‘I’ve heard rum ours that Western Digital Purple drives may be their best sounding drives? Anyone tried them vs WD Red?

I cant find any info hear. I searched for WD Purple and got nothing. 

thanks,

Steven

[plissken]

I use the WD Black for when I want the best out of my metal music,

 

I use their Blue drives for Blues, Blue Grass, Sad Country

 

I use their Red drives for all my Jazz

 

Their Green for Lord of the Dance DVD's

 

What ever you use just put it in a NAS and locate it away from the listening room and you will do fine.

 

My 12TB of storage is on their Green series in a Windows 10 Parity Storage Space.

 

 

[firedog]

IMO, green is best for less intensive uses like NAS - backup.

For music playback the Red and Black are supposedly more robust (longer life cycle/load-unload cycles) and have vibration protection. 

 

The Purple are designed for surveillance systems, I think the use in audio playback is almost exactly the opposite - mostly reading and less writing to the disk. 

http://nascompares.com/2017/03/17/what-is-the-difference-between-the-wd-colours-blue-red-black-green-purple-and-gold/

Quote

Released only a few years ago, the WD Purple HDD series is designed for Surveillance requirements. You might think that when using multiple IP or Cable Surveillance cameras in the home, office or retail sector, that you should only really think about the quality of hte cameras. This is sort of true – the better the camera, the more features and better recording. However if will all come to nothing if the Hard Drive media you are writing to is unsuitable. Unlike almost all other HDD use across all environments, Hard Disks used in Surveillance are more than 95% used for Writing and 5% for reading – i.e footage is recorded and written to the drives constantly and only accessed rarely by comparison (the reading of the disk). So, if you have x5 or x10 Relatively high recording cameras sending 2 or 5MB of recorded footage constantly, then you will need to ensure that both the recording server can keep up and that the drives are designed to record the data incoming as fast as it arrives! This is where WD Purple shines.

[sgr]

7 hours ago, plissken said:

I use the WD Black for when I want the best out of my metal music,

 

I use their Blue drives for Blues, Blue Grass, Sad Country

 

I use their Red drives for all my Jazz

 

Their Green for Lord of the Dance DVD's

 

What ever you use just put it in a NAS and locate it away from the listening room and you will do fine.

 

My 12TB of storage is on their Green series in a Windows 10 Parity Storage Space.

 

 

I’m tricking out one server in just green and building another for red to see which color is best for Christmas music. Thanks for all the tips. I guess I’ll be be buildibg a Server for each color. 

[sgr]

3 hours ago, firedog said:

IMO, green is best for less intensive uses like NAS - backup.

For music playback the Red and Black are supposedly more robust (longer life cycle/load-unload cycles) and have vibration protection. 

 

The Purple are designed for surveillance systems, I think the use in audio playback is almost exactly the opposite - mostly reading and less writing to the disk. 

http://nascompares.com/2017/03/17/what-is-the-difference-between-the-wd-colours-blue-red-black-green-purple-and-gold/

 

Thanks!

I”m aware of what they are used for. Somewhere I read something about the Purple drives sounding better. I wouldn’t really think they were suited for Audio and I do use Red NAS drives. But I do know the various drives and speed sound a bit different. 

 

All one one has to do is hold the drive to their ear and tap “Shave and a haircut. Two bits”. The differences in the resonance frequencies are easy to hear. ?

 

Thanks for your help. I have read several articles explaining the differences but not that one exactly. It’s interesting that the manufacturers go to the trouble to build several types of drives when perhaps they could just build one or two kinds and cut down on their costs. 

Thanks!

[firedog]

12 minutes ago, sgr said:

’s interesting that the manufacturers go to the trouble to build several types of drives when perhaps they could just build one or two kinds and cut down on their costs. 

Market segmentation- you get more people to buy more devices at different prices and features.

[yamamoto2002]

I read somewhere, maybe it was different product, the firmware is tuned for sustained data rate with sacrificing data integrity -- r/w retry count is reduced to shorten recording failure frames. One complete garbage frame of recorded surveillance video is more acceptable than permanent loss of 100 consecutive frames.

 

For audio playback, data integrity is more important than sustained data rate. I don't want to hear maximum volume white noise of 0.01 seconds from my speaker when listening music.

[plissken]

17 minutes ago, yamamoto2002 said:

I read somewhere, maybe it was different product, the firmware is tuned for sustained data rate with sacrificing data integrity -- r/w retry count is reduced to shorten recording failure frames. One complete garbage frame of recorded surveillance video is more acceptable than permanent loss of 100 consecutive frames.

 

For audio playback, data integrity is more important than sustained data rate. I don't want to hear maximum volume white noise of 0.01 seconds from my speaker when listening music.

 

You won't hear analog noise, you hear digital click/pop/stutter.

[yamamoto2002]

1 minute ago, plissken said:

 

You won't hear analog noise, you hear digital click/pop/stutter.

 

It is possible to buffer audio data from HDD to main memory to prevent stuttering caused by non-purple HDD retry.

[plissken]

1 minute ago, yamamoto2002 said:

 

It is possible to buffer audio data from HDD to main memory to prevent stuttering caused by non-purple HDD retry.

 

What WD is doing on the purple drive is a 25 year old trick: They loosen up the thermal head recalibration routine to ensure a lot of data can be written at speed. 

 

It's not about the reads its about the writes. 

[yamamoto2002]

Sorry, I rechecked and found the description is about the HDD for digital video recorder and it is not WD purple.

 

http://ascii.jp/elem/000/000/337/337954/index.html

[Miska]

My music network share is on Linux server with a WD Red Pro drive. I generally look up drives with 60 months warranty. If manufacturer doesn't trust their own drive and gives shorter warranty, it's not worth for my storage either...

 

Except Mac Mini which has same material on external Thunderbolt HDD.

 

[louisxiawei]

I'm just wondering: do you guys really can perceive the sounding difference among these WD models? I honestly think these WD HDD drives in different colours are just for difference purpose as firedog mentioned.

 

My purchase preference is similar to Miska, I always go for the longest warranty model which is WD gold or Pro series.

 

 

 

 

[firedog]

4 hours ago, louisxiawei said:

I'm just wondering: do you guys really can perceive the sounding difference among these WD models? I honestly think these WD HDD drives in different colours are just for difference purpose as firedog mentioned.

 

My purchase preference is similar to Miska, I always go for the longest warranty model which is WD gold or Pro series.

 

 

 

 

I  don't hear any difference.

But I do think the different models are slightly different, and you should choose the one that best fits what you will use it for. 

[plissken]

8 hours ago, louisxiawei said:

I'm just wondering: do you guys really can perceive the sounding difference among these WD models? I honestly think these WD HDD drives in different colours are just for difference purpose as firedog mentioned.

 

My purchase preference is similar to Miska, I always go for the longest warranty model which is WD gold or Pro series.

 

I've never heard a difference. If people worry about that then they need to worry about the drives used at Tidal, Spotify, Pandora. 

[yamamoto2002]

I found article about WD purple

 

https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/column/wdhdd/1023885.html

 

WD Purple supports ATA-7 "streaming feature set" commands which is originally designed for HDD digital video recorder (DVR). This command set is issued from DVR firmware to write multiple (up to 32) video streams simultaneously without data fragmentation. These special ATA commands are also issued by QNAP NAS based surveillance camera system but not issued from Windows therefore this feature is not used on Windows.

 

There is also some firmware tuning for data read behavior, read retry count is reduced to meet realtime read requirement. 

 

I think WD Purple is not suitable for storing audio data.

[CatManDo]

This thread on the WD forum describes some problems when using the WD purple drives - made for continuous video recording, not for long term data storage -  in a desktop computer

 

https://community.wd.com/t/wd-purple-for-desktop-use/17274/10