Review on Purple 4TB Surveillance Hard Drive by Ryan Koser

Western Digital has always told me that their video drives are great because of their durability. And while I'm sure they're fine, they're blurring the lines in homes, and what you don't realize is that they're not really video hard drives, as they don't support ATA-8 standards. They respond to ATA-8 read requests, but when the drive starts throwing read errors, they stop the stream instead of obeying ATA-8 and delivering a transient priority stream while trying to keep correcting errors. The ATA-8 streaming command set is designed to cause the host system to request data for a specified period of time. It prioritizes data transfer time over data integrity. This is important for video drives in DVRs. Other manufacturers combine video and surveillance functions, and drives work well with DVRs OR NVRs. However, Western Digital tells you that your hardware is not compatible with the drive. Seagate, HGST and Samsung manufacture video drives that are fully compatible with the ATA-8 standard. By insisting it's a video hard drive instead of admitting it's not, we're wasting all our time and money. I bought an 8TB hard drive on April 16, 2020. The production date is February 16, 2020. The dashcam started freezing for a month and on June 28th the dashcam restarted about every hour. It's 20% full, he didn't have enough time to fill it with data. The house is always between 68 and 72, and the DVR fan has direct access to room temperature air. The drive does get hot, but a Western Digital rep was just talking about how well this drive performs in hot conditions and that there are no limits to how much heat it can handle. I asked the rep if it was a real video drive, and before I could finish explaining what I meant, he started a rehearsed sales pitch that included phrases like "withstand unlimited heat" and emphasized the longevity of the drive. It is evident that they spend a lot of time protecting purple discs and extolling their virtues very well. I have no doubt that everything he said was true, I know and trust WD hard drives, in my daily work I build huge SAN systems based entirely on WD hard drives. I like this brand but their video drives are ONLY for surveillance and normal data use. They are not suitable for your DirectV DVR. They are NOT ATA-8 compatible video drives. They only work in DVRs if the drive is working properly. Once it starts producing late video frames due to error correction, DVRs that require ATA-8 behavior start freezing and/or crashing.