"Surveillance" hard drive - what is that exactly?

[neoprema]

Comparing the outer chassis of surveillance vs non-surveillance disks i see no difference. Which makes me wonder how it can handle anything different to a normal drive. Some do have longer warranties.

Case in point - I have a CCTV DVR in hidden somewhere that gets exceedingly hot (around 35C ambient air temp). A Western Digital Purple Surveillance drive just died after 9 months.

So yeah, gimmicky if you ask me. Also i've compared write between Purple and Blue and found no difference.

 

[Nerfherder]

OK, that made me lol.
These are digital devices. Are they saying the zeros and ones could end up being cockeye if I used it for storing regular binary data?

No, it won't be optimised for that but wont fail. It will probably slow at reading and underperform when compared to a normal drive of the same capacity. Usually a PC would use a drive that has been optimised for reading because that is mostly what it does. A database drive might be more balanced and optimised for both read and write.

If you feel like a read have a look at this, scroll down to WD purple.

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

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.

They are desisgned to keep up with this heavy writing behaviour in a NAS or DAS system, suitable for doing this whilst in a RAID 5 or RAID 6 and are designed to be powered on and in use for weeks and months at a time.