So let me ask these questions:
-What information is going to come out in a review that would make it appropriate or not appropriate for a NAS?
-Do you really expect people to be super hardcore to review a hard drive for something that is relatively obscure as a hard drive for security video?
For #1...
What I mean is, regardless of performance, latency, and all the standard reviewer's info, there's really nothing to go on as to how "good" or "bad" they will be for a NAS. If it stores data and has anything above about 50MB/sec then it'll be just fine for 99.9999% of us FreeNAS users. Why so low a speed? Because the read performance multiplies so even a 5 disk RAIDZ2 can saturate a Gb LAN connection. If Purple drives have lower resilience to data corruption a reviewer isn't necessarily going to find this out by doing some benchmarks on a brand new drive they are reviewing. If the hard drive has any "special features" that make it better for a particular application you can be assured that WD is going to put that in their propaganda. And any reviewer is simply going to cut and paste from that. No reviewer is really going to have the required technology and experience at their disposal to prove or disprove some of these features.
Weird quirks like the wdidle tool, firmware bugs, and things that REALLY do matter for people that want a 24x7
For #2...
Yes, some people will probably review the drives. And the market for these drives is currently rather small, and there's virtually no competition. So how are you going to compare a drive that is basically making a new market with ... something else that doesn't really exist?
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Now, if these purples turn out to be 4TB drives for $100 each(which is significantly below current market value for other 4TB drive, then it's going to blow my hair back and make me(and probably MANY other people) look at the drives very closely. But, until then, I don't think we're really looking at much for NAS. To some extent, I'm somewhat expecting these drives to be higher priced than your standard drive because they're being sold as "superior" for a specialized market. And anytime you start selling a product for a specialized market that's a 'feature'. And "features" means "more profit!"
Overall, I'm interested in reading about them, but if I don't see a review or any information for the next year I won't feel like I missed out on anything. This isn't a major game changer in the world of NASes or hard drives since it's clear that standard hard drives are more than adequate for the task. Just look at how many users have surveillance cameras at their home and store the video feeds on their FreeNAS box.
I feel as if this is a solution in search of a problem. And the problem doesn't exist, but WD is going to obviously convince a while bunch of people that this WD Purple is clearly better!