I am a security technician, I use WD purple drives in my DVRS. I have a customer who is very far away, over 2 hours drivetime. Her original WD drive failed after 3 years, about average. I replaced her hard drive 6 weeks ago with a WD purple. The drive has failed and she had an armed robbery this morning. They cannot retrieve the video, of course. She’s threatening to sue my company. Why would this drive fail so quickly? I thought these were the best drives available for security dvrs. I don’t have the serial, I’ll have to drive up there (2 hours) and take a replacement drive with me, purchased out of pocket and hope she doesn’t sue me! I’m sure you will replace the drive, but it will take too much time and another trip to the site. By purchasing one in advance, I’ll end up with a spare drive (didn’t need) and maybe out of business!
Hello Mike,
I’m terribly sorry to hear about what has happened. I do hope everyone are in good health!
Could you provide more information about how the drive was installed, what model is the drive, what is the brand and the model of the DVR that it was working in and if there were other drives inside the device? Where is the DVR located? How many cameras is it supporting? Do you have access to the drive’s S.M.A.R.T. data?
For the highest chances of recovering the data from the drive I would recommend turning to a data recovery company’s services.
Also, feel free to contact our live support if needed.
Please, keep me posted about the development of this.
Captain_WD.
WD “purple”, only drive in the DVR, DVR has a cooling fan and has been in
the same config. for 3+ years. The original drive failed after 3 years
(about average). This is a “techvision” DVR originally manufactured by
Dahua. We will attempt to recover data, the failed drive will be rma’d next
week when I am able to get to the site.
The drive should not have failed so quickly but this is a mechanical device after all and it may fail for one reason or another. This is why provide warranty to replace such units if something like this happens. For such an important data most security systems have a RAID setup for redundancy or a backup of the data, just in case something does happen to a drive.
Moreover, the failure may have been caused by other external factor such as damage during shipping, malfunctioning device, etc. I would strongly suggest to have redundancy or backups of such important data in future projects!
Captain_WD.
