So far, I read that 12TB WD Red Plus ones are considered the quietest 3.5" drives currently on the market.
But digging into WD product sheets, I found that the 14TB and 18TB Purple Pros seem even better on paper: both are 20/27 dBA (idle / seek), while the Red Plus is 20/29 dBA.
While I understand that the dBA metric can be misleading, both are on WD’s standardized datasheets.
What is also interesting is that these Purple Pro drives are on the same reliability level as the Ultrastar and Gold ones (2.5M MTBF), while those drives are usually much more noisy.
Does anyone have experience with these drives and any sense of comparison to the quietest Red Plus drives?
And as a second question, is anyone using these as NAS drives in an array? While the emphasis is on video surveillance, by characteristics, they seem to be similar to regular drives and, according to the product sheet, suitable for “RAID and JBOD configurations.”
