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.
“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.
