This seems to be the conventional wisdom but I can't say I've experienced it in practice. They have less cache than Reds and the firmware may be tuned for write

This seems to be the conventional wisdom but I can't say I've experienced it in practice. They have less cache than Reds and the firmware may be tuned for writes but I think it's mostly down to different market positioning/branding & price. You can compare the two: https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library/en_us/assets/public/western-digital/product/internal-drives/wd-purple-hdd/data-sheet-wd-purple-series-2879-800012.pdf https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library... and https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library/en_us/assets/public/western-digital/product/internal-drives/wd-red-hdd/product-brief-western-digital-wd-red-hdd.pdf https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library...