Western Digital Purple Surveillance Storage 4TB HDD Review
Specifications, Pricing, and Availability
Available in four capacity sizes, 1TB to 4TB, Purple drives bring surveillance-specific features to the market at a lower price than Western Digital's enterprise offerings. Designed for use in tabletop applications like the QNAP VS series with advanced surveillance features enabled, the secret sauce in this product is the firmware features that support up to 32 HD channels of recording.
Western Digital calls the new firmware feature AllFrame Technology.
Key benefits:
- Reduces video frame loss with surveillance-class storage.
- Specifically tuned for surveillance security systems.
- Caching algorithms are tuned for write-intensive, low bit rate, high stream count applications that are typical of surveillance applications.
- Priority change for write allocations and preemptive caching policies.
- TLER & ATA streaming support.
- Supports up to eight drives.
Western Digital also claims that Purple drives uses less power than competitors' surveillance products, but the claim was made before Seagate's latest surveillance product announcement, which came just one day before the Purple drive announcement.

Newegg already lists Purple SKUs and prices, but at the time of writing, the drives were out of stock. The top-tier model is the 4TB drive andoffers up to 32TB of capacity when configured with the maximum drive count of eight. In RAID 5, that would drop to 28TB of redundant storage. According to Western Digital's Capacity Selector tool, that is enough for 16 cameras recording at 1080p with 12 frames per second and storing the data for 30 days.
The Purple products ship with a three-year warranty.
PRICING: You can find the Western Digital Purple (3TB) for sale below. The prices listed are valid at the time of writing but can change at any time. Click the link to see the very latest pricing for the best deal.
United States: The Western Digital Purple (3TB) retails for $141.53 at Amazon.
Canada: The Western Digital Purple (3TB) retails for CDN$187.76 at Amazon Canada.
Recommended for You
- We at TweakTown openly invite the companies who provide us with review samples / who are mentioned or discussed to express their opinion of our content. If any company representative wishes to respond, we will publish the response here.
Related Tags
Latest News Posts
- New Dragon Age could be mainline sequel
- Halo devs: PC community is very important to us
- Modded Halo Online PC project under fire by Microsoft
- New PC game deals: Frostpunk and BattleTech for 22% off
- South Park: The Fractured But Whole trailer for Switch
Forum Activity
- GA-X79-UD3 NVMe
- MyDigitalDiscount 128GB/256GB/512GB M.2 NVMe PCIe SSD Review
- EVGA DG-77 Mid-Tower Chassis Review
- Samsung 970 EVO 1TB M.2 NVMe PCIe SSD Review
- B360M-ITX/ac does not see USB drive at all
Press Releases
- Micron Launches Industry's First Enterprise SATA Solid State Drives Built on Leading 64-layer 3D NAND Technology
- Micron, Rambus, Northwest Logic and Avery Design to Deliver a Comprehensive GDDR6 Solution for Next-Generation Applications
- Toshiba Memory America Unveils UFS Devices Utilizing 64-Layer, 3D Flash Memory
- ASUS Announces GeForce GTX 1070 Ti Series Gaming Graphics Cards
- ASUS Announces ASUS Hangouts Meet Hardware Kit