WD Purple wd40purx for storage

I bought a WD Purple wd40purx r for storage and put it into a rosewill rx304-apu3-35b external fan cooled case for storage of a lot of content files after formatting the volume size is 3725.90 gb ntfs. However I cannot seem to open the drive in file explorer in win 10 to start moving my files over. Can someone help me with this?

Hey Godwin :slight_smile:

Did you follow the regular steps of initializing, partitioning, formatting and assigning a drive letter to the drive in Disk Management?

Is the drive visible in Device Manager or This PC? Are you getting any kind of errors? Are your OS and drivers updated to the latest versions?

I would try that enclosure on another computer and see if it works there. This way you may be able to narrow down the problem to either the drive/enclosure or to your OS. I would also try the drive internally and see if it’s visible in BIOS, Device Manager or Disk Management.

Post back with some details! :slight_smile:

Captain_WD.

I forgot to assign a drive letter. Problems is fixed. I want an honest opinnion I bought the WD purple drive just for storage purposes as I am tried of having the green drive that comes from wd externals fail on me i have had 4 within 6 yrs. Did I make a wise decision?

Hey, I’m glad it turned out to be something simple. :slight_smile:

WD Purple is specifically designed for Surveillance storage and isn’t really recommended for regular storage. I believe this article can be quite useful in explaining how Surveillance-class drives are a bit different than regular storage drives.

These drives do work with quite low noise and temperature levels but are not recommended for regular usage outside surveillance and video recording/streaming.

Captain_WD.

The article you linked doesn’t say why a Purple drive is unsuitable for desktop use.
Since normal desktops don’t support streaming ATA commands, it shouldn’t be detrimental for purple drives to be used in a desktop if there are spares lying around.

Well?

Hey wdbro.

Basically, you are correct, but so is @Captain_WD (he’s not available today, so that’s why I’ve
stepped in :slight_smile: ). You can use a WD Purple drive as a regular secondary storage drive if you have one lying around and I’ve seen lots of cases where this has been done without any issues at all. However, as @Captain_WD has mentioned - it’s not recommended that this is your choice if you go for a secondary storage drive, because of the different firmware used for the WD Purple HDDs. Having in mind that said firmware has for that kind of usage (having in mind ATA streaming commands), you should know that the idea behind that type of commands is that in these cases, keeping the write rate is prioritized instead of having every single byte of data in a perfect condition. This is OK and it might not even be noticeable if it ever happens with a video (especially having in mind WD Purple’s optimization for video surveillance usage with high quality results). Basically that means that the device will transfer the requested amount of data from the host within the time specified, even if an error occurs. So for other type of usage, this could result in a corrupted file, while in video streaming, you won’t lose the constant write flow and thus lose the whole video and the end result will be a full video file.

Hope that clarifies things a bit.
CK_WD