Western Digital Launches 18TB Purple Hard Drive for Surveillance

Western Digital offers a range of color-coded hard drives for different usage scenarios: blue for computing, gold for enterprise, black for gaming, red for NAS, and purple for surveillance. And it’s that last type receiving an upgrade this week. WD Purple(Opens in a new window) surveillance hard drives had their capacity increase by 28 percent, allowing for a new 18TB model(Opens in a new window).

Purple drives are optimized for use with Digital Video Recorders (DVR) and Network Video Recorders (NVR), and will now ship in 8TB, 10TB, 12TB, 14TB, and 18TB capacities. The drives include AllFrame AI technology, which enables them to cope with up to 64 high-definition cameras being recorded at the same time. A workload rate of 360TB per year is supported.

DVR systems process video data at the recorder, where as NVR systems encode and process data at the camera. It’s here where Western Digital believes Purple drives provide the most benefit and allow for the ever-increasing amount of deep learning and AI that takes place around video surveillance. The larger drives also allow for more reference images and metadata to be stored alongside the video being recorded “to support more effective AI.” As well as those 64 camera feeds, Western Digital says its Purple drives can cope with a further 32 streams (of recorded video/data) for deep learning analytics.

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The 18TB drive is expected to become available next month and will be followed by a 1TB WD Purple microSD card(Opens in a new window) in November, which is designed for AI-enabled or surveillance cameras, as well as acting as a reliable backup storage solution. Western Digital made the card weather resistant, humidity resistant, and capable of withstanding a temperature range of -25 to 85 degrees Celsius, while supporting 500 program-erase cycles. Pricing for the new hard drive and microSD card has yet to be announced.