WD Expands ‘Purple’ Surveillance Hard Drive Lineup, Offers Capacities Up To 6TB

Since about the time WD launched its NAS-focused Red series of hard drives, the company has been slowly transitioning the rest of its series over to newer, simpler naming schemes. Caviar Black became ‘WD Black’, for example, and instead of WD RE 5, we got ‘WD Re’. The drives formerly known as ‘A/V’ got renamed to Purple earlier this year, and now, we’re seeing brand-new models, with densities of anywhere between 1TB and 6TB available.

WD’s Purple drives are designed for IoT or surveillance-type use, which makes it more of a serious offering than most of the others. Two key features help set this drive apart from the rest: AllFrame improves performance in multiple regards, including reducing frame loss and improving playback, and IntelliSeek adjusts the seek-times on-the-fly, optimizing its power-efficiency. These drives are also designed for use in higher temperatures; they peak at 65°C, which is interestingly enough 10°C higher than the WD Re series.

Given their specific use, and increased capabilities, WD’s Purple drives carry a bit of a price premium over both Red and Green. The 6TB model is currently available for $329, whereas the Red sells for $40 cheaper. It’s really unfair to compare the two drives from that standpoint, however, since both cater to very different needs, but pricing like that is interesting to note nonetheless.

Our friends at QNAP have this to say about WD’s Purple: “As the surveillance market extends to monitoring with 4K displays, we envision that many users will begin adopting 4K IP cameras that record videos, which are four times larger than videos from 1080p IP cameras,” said David Chiang, general manager of QNAP Security. “With the offering of WD Purple 6 TB hard drive, our users can enjoy higher capacities for storage-intensive surveillance applications with 24/7 reliability.”

WD’s newest Purple drives are available now. As mentioned above, the 6TB model is selling for $329, and a 5TB model will follow soon. Other densities include the $70 1TB, $90 2TB, $125 3TB, and $160 4TB.