Skip to main content

Western Digital announces Purple lineup of surveillance-focused 3.5-inch hard drives

western digital announces security focused line purple 3 5 inch hard drives wd
Image used with permission by copyright holder

If you employ a system of surveillance cameras outside of your home or business, being able to record and store the footage is great, but finding the hard drive space to stow away an abundance of recorded video can be a pain. This gives hardware makers like Western Digital an opportunity to make devices that are geared toward such uses, like their new line of Purple 3.5-inch hard drives, which the storage maker just announced today.

Western Digital’s Purple drives ship in flavors that range from 1TB to 4TB, and feature a pair of technologies geared toward home or business surveillance. The first is dubbed AllFrame. Western Digital claims that with AllFrame, their Purple drives reduce footage loss by using a proprietary method of cache management that improves both data flow and playback. Then there’s Advanced Format Technology, which allegedly allows hard drive makers to continue to expand the sizes of their disks. The bigger the hard drive, the more footage you can store. You can use Western Digital Purple drives with up to 32 HD cameras. Each drive in the Purple line features a 64MB cache.

wdfWDPurple
Image used with permission by copyright holder

“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 24×7 workloads of surveillance environments.”

Western Digital Purple drives are available right now. Here’s how pricing stacks up:

1TB: $89.99

2TB: $119.99

3TB: $159.99

4TB: $199.99

What do you think? Sound off in the comments below.

Editors' Recommendations

Konrad Krawczyk
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Konrad covers desktops, laptops, tablets, sports tech and subjects in between for Digital Trends. Prior to joining DT, he…
How to check how much RAM you have on Windows and Mac
RAM installed in slots.

You can only know if you have enough RAM, if you know how to check how much you have. Fortunately, doing so is super quick and easy and then you can decide whether you want to upgrade your memory -- here's how to choose new memory sticks -- or whether you have enough for what you need to do.

You certainly don't need to buy more or new RAM just for the sake of it, and if you have enough for what you need, more memory won't make much difference anyway.

Read more
The real reason so many laptops have moved to soldered RAM
The Intel 12th-gen Mainboard upgrade for the Framework Laptop.

The completely redesigned Dell XPS 14 and 16 came out this year as two of the most divisive laptops in recent memory. No, it wasn't just the capacitive touch buttons or invisible trackpad that caused an uproar -- it also moved to soldered RAM. This was a big change from the past, where the XPS 15 and 17 were both celebrated for their upgradability.

Of course, Dell isn't the first to make the transition. In fact, they're one of the last, which is what makes the decision so much tougher to swallow. Where soldered RAM was previously limited to just MacBooks and ultrabooks, it's now affecting most high-performance laptops for gaming as well. Even the fantastic ROG Zephyrus G14 moved to soldered memory this year.

Read more
How to check the storage space on your Mac
The About This Mac window showing storage usage, alongside a window offering suggestions on how to save storage spce in MacOS Monterey.

Upgrading storage on your Mac isn't always easy, or even possible, so knowing how much storage space you have, and how to free up more, is a great idea. Often when you buy a Mac, that's the storage you're stuck with -- although external drives and cloud storage are always an option.

Luckily, checking your available storage -- and then freeing up space for the things you want to keep -- is very easy to do. In this guide, we’ll walk you through the process of checking your Mac’s storage space, then show you a few quick ways of clearing out the junk you no longer need.

Read more