My own view is to use consumer drives (low power ones) in dvr's but some prefer enterprise or prosumer nas type drives.

I have always run desktop drives in my own servers and have never seen the need for enterprise drives but here is an interesting blog from a datacentre some of you may be interested in

 

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-update-september-2014/

v.interesting, must admit I'm a sucker for the SV35 range, suppose customer could always be left to make

the choice...

Western Digital have different colours for different uses. Purple for DVR.s and Red for Servers and Nas Drives

WD colour range

I always thought they were pretty much all the same apart from maybe firmware. Imagine the production line using different components across all the sizes just for wd? then there are the re drives and the sas drives on top of that!

I always wondered if the PCBs were slightly different, i.e better voltage regs on the surveillance and NAS as they often use plug top trafos?

 

Otherwise yeah most of the differences would just be method of operation.

 

So, Are Enterprise Drives Worth The Cost?

From a pure reliability perspective, the data we have says the answer is clear: No.

Enterprise drives do have one advantage: longer warranties. That’s a benefit only if the higher price you pay for the longer warranty is less than what you expect to spend on replacing the drive.

This leads to an obvious conclusion: If you’re OK with buying the replacements yourself after the warranty is up, then buy the cheaper consumer drives.

same site direct comparison of enterprise vs consumer drives

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/enterprise-drive-reliability/

We always use the WD purple drives, a bit more expensive but nothing significant

But do you need to bother? Perhaps from a keep-up-appearances POV yes... But from a technical

perpective, perhaps not! Or so it seems.

Slightly off topic, but DVR hard drive fails following PAT testing, power cuts etc is one of our largest growth areas (in terms of enquiries). And as CCTV systems are now prevalent, I see it being the biggest source of new work very soon. Three enquiries for this just this week.

Interesting, it used to be routers that got killed by PAT