WD Purple 6TB Surveillance Hard Drive RAID Review

Introduction We have already had the pleasure to see how WD's 6TB Purple surveillance hard disk performed in our previous review, but WD was kind enough to provide us with two of these drives and thereby allowing us to test them in a RAID environment too. A surveillance setup will rarely consist of just one hard drive, making this review one to take a closer look at before investing in your future surveillance storage. With two drives at our disposal, we can run them as in RAID 1 and RAID 0 setups, depending on whether we want speed and storage or redundancy. There isn't one setup that is better than another, it comes down to what you need in your setup. Most people will probably get more drives and opt for a RAID 5, RAID 6, or RAID 10 setup, but those are out of our reach when working with just two drives. Whether you want to protect your personal assets and loved ones or monitor the business you worked hard to build, you'll want surveillance-class storage to rely on. Not only are these drives built for 24/7 usage in environments with up to 8 disks, they also come with enhanced firmware built just for this kind of operation. When it comes to surveillance, every frame counts, and every frame has to be perfect. This is especially noticeable when many cameras are using the drives simultaneously. WD's Purple series has no trouble here and it is designed to work in setups with up to 32 HD cameras. The WD Purple 6TB surveillance drive features 64MB cache and uses the well-known WD IntelliPower system for the spindle speed. It is rated for a sustained transfer speed of up to 175MB/s and comes with a power draw of 5.3W in operation, 4.9W when idle, and 0.4W in standby or sleep mode. The noise level is rated to 45 dBA idle and 26 dBA seeking, so they're barely audible. With a weight of 750 grams, the WD Purple 6TB isn't the lightest drive, but that's no surprise considering the capacity. Western Digital also designed the Purple series to work in high-temperature environments. The temperature rating of the drive, on the base casting, ranges from zero to 65 degrees Celcius when operating and -40 to 70 when non-operating. The Purple series has a mean time before failure of 1 million hours and can withstand 300,000 load/unload cycles. On top of that you also get a two-year limited warranty. One of the things that make the WD Purple series so great is the exclusive AllFrame technology that works with ATA streaming to reduce error pixelation and video interruptions that easily occur when desktop drives are incorrectly used in security systems. Missed frames and lost footage is a serious problem when an event occurs and surveillance footage needs to be retrieved. WD Purple with AllFrame provides the confidence you should expect when it's time to play back and review critical surveillance footage. AllFrame Features: Reduces video frame loss with surveillance-class storage. Specifically tuned for surveillance security systems. Caching algorithms are tuned for write-intensive, low bit rate, high stream count applications that are typical of surveillance applications. Priority change for write allocations and preemptive caching policies. TLER & ATA streaming support. Supports up to eight drives. Specifications The specifications are taken directly from the manufacturers homepage at the time of the review and might as such be subject to possible future changes. Test Procedure & Specifications Testing a mechanical hard drive's performance is pretty straightforward and there isn't much to say about. I will be testing the drive, in this case, the WD Purple 6TB Surveillance hard disk, in a wide a variety of applications to gather as many tests results as possible. In return, it will hopefully allow you to find just the right comparison so you are well equipped with knowledge when you decide what you next storage drive should be. Test system: Supermicro C7Z97-OCE Intel Xeon E3-1230Lv3 Corsair Vengeance 16GB 1866MHz Kingston HyperX 240GB SSD Sapphire R7 240 2GB be quiet! Dark Power Pro 850W Thermaltake Water 3.0 Performer Software used: AIDA64 Storage Benchmark Anvil's Storage Utilities AS SSD Benchmark ATTO Benchmark CrystalDiskMark PCMark 8 Storage Benchmark IOMeter HD Tach I will be creating each possible RAID array through the Intel RAID tool and fully initialize it through the IRST control panel before running each test. I will be running a series of benchmarks with the software mentioned above on each array before destroying it and moving on to the next. I'll be using two drives today, which limits me to the RAID 1 and RAID 0 modes and both results will be compared to the single drive performance to show the scalability in performance. The SSD with the operating system is running on a different SATA controller to avoid possible performance impact. Each of the following pages will display a list of screenshots from each test as well as comparison charts for a quick overview. AIDA64 Engineer AIDA64 is a streamlined Windows diagnostic and benchmarking software for home users. It provides a wide range of features to assist in overclocking, hardware error diagnosis, stress testing, and sensor monitoring. It has unique capabilities to assess the performance of the processor, system memory, and disk drives and is compatible with most Microsoft Windows operating systems. It also has a disk benchmark tool, and that is the one we'll be using. The Random Read and Write tests measure the random performance by reading or writing variable-sized data blocks at random locations on the surface of the drive. The Random tests are actually a combination of both speed and access times as it moves the position before each new operation. The Access time tests are designed to measure the data access performance by reading or writing small 0.5KB data blocks at random locations on the drive surface. RAID 0 Performance RAID 1 Performance The WD Purple 6TB surveillance hard drive scales well and shows pretty close to double the performance in RAID 0 setups and barely any impact when in a RAID 1 setup. The access times for both read and write stay pretty much the same in all of these scenarios. Anvil's Storage Utilities Anvil's Storage Utilities is a relative new benchmarking utility that has the ability to test mainly hard drives and solid state drives, but also any other form of storage medium that you can throw at it. It is completely free as well, which is a nice thing As well as testing the drive in a variety of benchmarking tests, it also has a drive endurance test that consistently reads and writes data to the selected medium to give days, months and potentially even years of use in a shorter period of time to see how the drive handles in the long run. Compressible Data Incompressible Data RAID 0 Performance RAID 1 Performance The WD Purple showed a great scalability again here in Anvil's Storage Benchmark. Close to double the performance in RAID 0 setups and barely any impact from RAID 1, compared to a single disk setup. AS SSD The AS SSD software determines the performance of Solid State Drives (SSD). The tool contains five synthetic and three practice tests. The synthetic tests determine the sequential and random read and write performance of the SSD. These tests are performed without using the operating system caches. In Sequential tests, the program measures the time it takes to read and write a 1 GB file respectively. To give a clearer picture of the drives tested, I've chosen to include all tests. Special the copy test is one that I think is relevant on the consumer level as it gives the user a view To give a clearer picture of the drives tested, I've chosen to include all tests, also the copy test. While it isn't the most static test, I think it is a relevant test in the eyes of consumers, giving them a view into one of the operations they're going to be doing many times. RAID 0 Performance RAID 1 Performance AS SSD paints the picture of where the WD Purple really shines: Random write operation. That is a really good thing because that is what it needs, especially when dealing with a lot of HD cameras on your surveillance station. For the rest, we see the same picture as before, a drive that scales well in our setup. ATTO The ATTO Disk Benchmark is a performance measurement tool is for Windows. It measures storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for both reads and writes. It has multiple options available to customize your performance measurement, including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. ATTO can be used to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives so it is a popular tool everywhere. RAID 0 Performance RAID 1 Performance ATTO is designed for pure sequential testing and that falls a little outside of the Purple's area, which shows in the comparisons where it doesn't scale as well as in the other benchmarks. CrystalDiskMark CrystalDiskMark is a small HDD benchmark utility for your hard drive that enables you to rapidly measure sequential and random 4KB/512KB read/write speeds. RAID 0 Performance RAID 1 Performance HD Tach HD Tach is a program that tests the sequential read, random access and interface burst speeds of the attached storage device (hard drive, flash drive, removable drive etc.). Drive technologies such as SCSI, IDE/ATA, IEEE 1394, USB, SATA, and RAID are all supported. Version 3.0.4.0 is sadly the final version and the software has reached its end-of-life support. It's still a nifty benchmarking tool and it can't hurt to include it in our tests. RAID 0 Performance RAID 1 Performance PCMark 8 PCMark 8 Storage benchmark is used test the performance of SSDs, HDDs, and hybrid drives with traces recorded from Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office and a selection of popular games. You can test any recognized storage device, including local external drives. Unlike synthetic storage tests, the PCMark 8 Storage benchmark highlights real-world performance differences between storage devices. Yes, I know that the WD Purple isn't designed to be worked in a desktop environment where these apps and games are run, but I'll still include it for the sake of comparison. RAID 0 Performance RAID 1 Performance IOmeter IOMeter is an I/O subsystem measurement and characterization tool for single and clustered systems. It is used as a benchmark and troubleshooting tool and is easily configured to replicate the behavior of many popular applications. One commonly quoted measurement provided by the tool is IOPS. IOMeter allows the configuration of disk parameters such as the ‘Maximum Disk Size’, ‘Starting Disk Sector’ and ‘# of Outstanding I/Os’. This allows a user to configure a test file upon which the ‘Access Specifications’ configure the I/O types to the file. Random Drive Performance Sequential Drive Performance Final Thoughts Pricing At the time of writing, the WD Purple 6TB Surveillance Hard Disk can be found at NewEgg for $256.99, at Overclockers UK for £214.99, or through Geizhals starting from €251.04. Conclusion The 6TB Purple surveillance drive from WD already impressed us in its single drive review and it was no different in this RAID review with two of these great hard disk drives. When it comes to security and safety, there shouldn't be any compromises and you should pick your medium with care. WD's Purple series is designed for just this task and after seeing it in RAID action, there is little doubt that Purple is a great choice. The WD Purple 6TB surveillance hard disk is designed to work in harsh environments and always-on scenarios as well as being designed for surveillance systems with up to eight drives and up to 32 HD cameras. The real strength of this drive, next to being built on a solid hardware foundation, lies within the is the firmware and WD's exclusive AllFrame technology. It specifically tuned for surveillance security systems and reduces video frame loss. The caching algorithms are tuned for write-intensive, low bit rate, high stream count applications that are typical of surveillance applications and it supports priority change for write allocations and preemptive caching policies as well as TLER & ATA streaming. We saw a great scalability in our RAID tests with almost double the performance in RAID 0 setups while RAID 1 barely affected the performance. This is a great result, but I hadn't expected it to be any different after the single drive review. Pros Great scalability Good price per GB of storage WD AllFrame technology Up to 8 drives Up to 32 HD cameras Cons none "Don't compromise when it comes to safety and surveillance and with WD's Purple series you don't need to. You can't go wrong with a good price per GB coupled with a great performance and an optimized firmware." Thank You WD for providing us with this sample