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.