WD®, a Western Digital company and storage industry leader, today announced the availability of WD Purple™, a purpose-built line of 3.5-inch, high-capacity hard drives for surveillance applications. Designed specifically for video surveillance units, WD Purple hard drives excel in new and existing home and small business security environments with up to eight hard drives and up to 32 high-definition video cameras. Shipping today, WD Purple hard drives are available in capacities from 1 TB up to 4 TB.

“By expanding our ‘Power of Choice’ product portfolio with WD Purple, we make it simple for our VARs, integrators and consumers to select the right drive engineered for their application and validated with our industry leading surveillance partners,” said Matt Rutledge, senior vice president and general manager of WD’s Storage Technology group.  “WD optimized the WD Purple line of hard drives for surveillance applications to improve high-definition video playback, and operate in 24x7 workloads of surveillance environments.” “Different from ordinary desktop hard drives designed for eight hours of daily operation, WD Purple drives have the built-in reliability to operate in Hikvision home and small business system installations so critical video footage is available when it is needed most,” said Ying Yang, director of testing, Hikvision. “An additional benefit of WD Purple drives is they support up to eight drives and 32 HD cameras so there is the flexibility to expand for future system coverage.”

“The biggest trend impacting the video surveillance market in recent years has been the transition from analog cameras to network cameras,” said Jon Cropley, principal analyst for video surveillance at IHS Technology. “With enhanced resolution, wide dynamic range and day/night functionality in cameras increasing, demand for storage solutions capable of accommodating large volumes of video will also increase.” Optimized to withstand the demands of always-on digital PVR, DVR and NVR recording environments, WD Purple hard drives offer low power consumption and many advanced performance features typically reserved for enterprise-level storage.

Features
WD Purple hard drives are equipped with an array of exclusive WD technologies, including:
- AllFrame™ - When combined with ATA streaming support, AllFrame™ technology helps to reduce video footage loss with a proprietary cache policy management technology to help improve data flow and playback. WD Purple includes exclusive firmware upgrades that protect against video pixilation and interruptions within a surveillance system

- Advanced Format Technology™ - the more efficient media format that enables increased areal densities, adopted by WD and other drive manufacturers to continue growing hard drive capacities

Engineered for Compatibility
Built for easy integration into new or existing video surveillance systems, WD Purple hard drives are designed and tested to surveillance-class standards and are compatible with industry-leading chassis and chip-sets. Without a current industry standard, WD worked closely with surveillance partners to develop a proprietary benchmark to define and demonstrate performance in surveillance systems. Tests of WD Purple hard drives indicate superior performance to competitive surveillance-class brands of storage, especially as cameras, channel count and workloads increase. A special Compatibility Selector is available to assist customers with surveillance drive selection at: www.wd.com