WD Targets CCTV Market With New Line of Hard Drives

IRVINE, Calif. – WD, a Western Digital company, unveiled its WD Purple line of hard drives that the company says is optimized for mainstream video surveillance applications.

The 3.5-inch drives – available in capacities from 1 to 4 terabytes – are designed to withstand the demands of video surveillance applications where the drive spends the vast majority of its time writing. This can result in high temperature fluctuations and equipment vibrations.

“WD Purple is our evolution of surveillance storage. We had been servicing this market with a standard consumer electronics drive, but now we have improved that and have this line which is specifically optimized for the surveillance market,” Richard Reid, a Western Digital product manager, tells SSI

The new line extends Western Digital’s campaign to delineate hard drive market segments with an accompanying color-based branding, which makes it simple for security integrators, VARs and consumers to select the right drive engineered for their application, Reid says.

WD is targeting the new line at OEMs building mainstream video surveillance systems and NAS boxes designed for pairing with IP video cameras, as well as residential and small- to medium-sized businesses looking to upgrade existing systems. The drives are designed to be installed in table-top surveillance systems with one to eight drive bays that support one to 32 IP cameras. The drives are rated for workloads of 60TB of writes per year and are backed by a three-year warranty.

Western Digital forecasts the surveillance market for hard drive requirements growing at about a 13% CAGR, with much of that growth attributed to NVRs.  The continuing market shift from legacy analog cameras to IP-based systems is also driving the need for increased storage, Reid says.

“As systems transition from standard analog cameras to IP cameras, the data required goes up four fold. So a typical standard def camera is about 2 megabytes per second and a high def camera is 8 megabytes per second,” Reid explains. “A standard system with analog cameras might be shipped with a [500GB] drive. As the customer moves their standard system up to IP cameras they are moving up to a 1-terabyte drive. That is just for the low-end systems. This WD Purple line with the highest capacity of 4 terabytes plays right into that transition from analog to IP cameras.”

WD Purple hard drives are equipped with an array of exclusive WD technologies, including AllFrame. When combined with ATA streaming support, the firmware helps to reduce video footage loss with a proprietary cache policy management technology to help improve data flow and playback, Reid says.

Built for easy integration into new or existing video surveillance systems, WD Purple hard drives are compatible with industry-leading chassis and chip-sets. Without a current industry standard, Reid says WD worked closely with surveillance partners to develop a proprietary benchmark to define and demonstrate performance in surveillance systems.

A special Compatibility Selector is available to assist customers with surveillance drive selection here.

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Although Bosch’s name is quite familiar to those in the security industry, his previous experience has been in daily newspaper journalism. Prior to joining SECURITY SALES & INTEGRATION in 2006, he spent 15 years with the Los Angeles Times, where he performed a wide assortment of editorial responsibilities, including feature and metro department assignments as well as content producing for latimes.com. Bosch is a graduate of California State University, Fresno with a degree in Mass Communication & Journalism. In 2007, he successfully completed the National Burglar and Fire Alarm Association’s National Training School coursework to become a Certified Level I Alarm Technician.

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