WD purple vs red is the debate that is been going on for a while now in the hard drive space. WD here stands of Western Digital. It is the leading and one of the most trusted manufacturers of Hard drives. If you have any old PC lying around, chances are you would find a Western Digital Hard Drive in it. The Western Digital hard drives come in the color of rainbows, where each color is best suited for its particular purpose and use case. WD Blue is the best-selling and mainstream product of Western Digital’s product lineup. But today, we would discuss the lesser-known colors, WD purple vs red.
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WD Hard-drives and Color scheme
Western Digital, the leading manufacturer of hard drives, has a unique way of differentiating its product lineup. A color scheme is used to distinguish among various hard drives designed to serve a particular purpose. At the core, they are all just hard drives, they work pretty much the same and can also be interchanged if needed, but they differ slightly based on their colors. The colors show the purpose of the drive. It should be used to get the best out of it. Primarily, Blue, Black, Red, Purple, Green, and Gold are used. A better understanding of the WD coloring scheme can be found on WD’s official webpage https://www.westerndigital.com/en-in/solutions/compare-our-color-drives.
WD Purple vs Red : Purple drives
Before diving into WD purple vs red, let us understand each of them separately. The WD Purple is a high-capacity hard drive designed explicitly for Surveillance data storage. These drives are best suited for DVRs and other video storage devices. It uses the AllFrame technology that reduces the loss of frames from the stored videos, and it also has exceptional support to store HD content. The build quality of these drives is also very high keeping in mind that they operate in a surveillance system. Continous high-bandwidth I/O operation 24×7 is the purpose these drives are best for.
WD Purple vs RED: Red Drives
The WD Red product line family is best known for its durability and performance in the NAS(Network Attached Storage) environment. Due to their superior build quality to sustain vibrations and higher I/O bandwidth to work as NAS, these drives are widely used in building storage servers. A set of these drives can be arranged in the array of drives, and the RAID configuration of choice can be easily set up in these. These also come in M.2 form factor for high bandwidth NVMe data transfer.
WD Purple vs Red: head to head
The following table compares the wd purple vs red in head-to-head comparison metrics.
| Metric | WD Purple | WD Red |
|---|---|---|
| Form Factor | 3.5″ | 3.5″/2.5″/NGFF |
| Storage | 500GB-18TB | 750GB-18TB |
| Interface | SATA | SATA/M.2 |
| Max. Bandwidth | 178MBps | 178MBps |
| Warranty | 3 years | 3 years |
| RPMs | 5400 | 5400 |
WD purple vs red pro
The wd red pro is the top variant of the wd red product line. The red pro comes with a capacity of 18TB in the 3.5″ SATA form factor. The WD Red NAS HDD pro also comes with a higher RPM of 7200. It has built-in NAS firmware support and also comes with a 5-year warranty. On the other hand, the purple counterpart also has an 18TB model. It is optimized to use All-frame AI technology to store the surveillance data. It also spins at 7200rpms and can also be used for Network Video Recorder (NVR) applications.
Both the 18TB models have the same capacity and use the same mechanical hardware. The only difference between them is their particular use cases. The Red one is designed to Work in a NAS server environment, while the purple one is used for surveillance data storage environment.
WD purple vs red for directv
DirecTV is a television video program distributor. It provides both satellite TV and streaming services. The DirecTV satellite receiver (setup-box) supports a program recording feature. Users can record the content and then watch it at a suitable time. It also has a rewind feature that rewinds the current content playing via satellite. All these features require video to be recorded and stored on a local hard drive. The WD purple is most suitable for this purpose as it is specially designed for video data storage.
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WD purple vs red for DVRs
DVR (Digital Video Recorders) are devices that are used for recording and streaming the footage of surveillance or CCTV cameras. Based on the type of DVRs, There can be multiple threads reading and writing on a single drive simultaneously for an extended period. The available I/O bandwidth and durability are the main constraints in this scenario. Here again, The WD purple drive takes the lead. It is best suited for DVRs and uses an AI feature called All frame, which prevents frame drops while reading or writing on the disk.
FAQs Related to WD purple vs red
Which of both drives is best for gaming?
WD has another variant designed explicitly for gaming. The black variant is most suitable and optimized for gaming performance.
Which operating system is best for the NAS servers?
Any server-based Operating System can be used, but the best choice is TrueNAS.
Which drive should be used for primary computer usage?
Western Digital’s Green and Blue drives are best suited for daily computer usage.
Conslusion
Western Digital is the leading Hard drive manufactures and offers drivers for almost all purposes. The wd purple vs red is two such products widely used at the enterprise level. Both drives are mechanically similar but differ based on their integration environment. To choose between any particular drive, you must first understand your use case what do you want to achieve with your storage capacity. If you wish to establish a server or cloud storage, then Red ones are suggested, but if you’re going to use your storage for video recording storage or in DVRs, use the Purple ones.
