Western Digital Purple, HDD Especially for Video-Surveillance

Western Digital Technologies, Inc. announced a new category of disks aimed especially at serving the video-surveillance market, the Purple.

The video-surveillance market is growing, with the drop of HDD and HD camera prices. More and more home and businesses acquire surveillance systems and need larger and larger amount of storage space. MarketsandMarkets predicted that the surveillance storage market is going to grow by $10.4 billion in 2018 in which NAS is expected to be the biggest market. The number one HDD manufacturer in the world is determined to not let that market passes.

This new product is the result of six months of engineering testing and evaluation of surveillance systems, according to the company. The disk is reminiscent of the Red HDDs introduced last year, it can boast up to 4TB of storage and is made for 24/7 operation. Western Digital re-branded some of its video surveillance products, tweaked them to be optimized for surveillance needs and spin that off into new class of disks next to the BGBR (Blue, Green, Black, Red) lineup.

In comparative studies led by WD, the HDD proved to be better at regulating power consumptions and heat management. The company acquired some experiences in the always-on disk with its Red NAS HDDs and build up on that knowledge to serve this particular market. The AllFrame software technology is a combination of better ATA utilization and some cache system optimization.

Rival Seagate is also in this video surveillance HDD market with its SV35 series from 1TB to 3TB and is annoucing a new line today, same day as WD. Strange coincidence for two firms supposed to be competitors.

This first WD systems can hold up to 32 cameras and HD video feed simultaneously and is aimed at home and SMB markets.

The company believes that there is a market in home surveillance. And for companies with greater needs, WD offers the Se and Re solutions, the latter touted as supporting an unlimited number of cameras and channels. In the future, the specs of the professional solutions will trickle down to the more end user hardware.

To get better magins, Seagate and especially WD have recently this news idea to offer their standard HDDs with some small different specs to optimize them depending on the applications. Problem here is that video surveillance storage subsystems are generally NAS. So what to choose: Red or Purple?

After special disk drives for NAS and video surveillance, tomorrow for backup and RAID?

Pricing of Purple HDDs;

• $69 for 1TB

• $89 for 2TB

• $129 for 3TB

• $159 for 4TB