As part of their global launch of a hard drive specifically designed for the surveillance market WD®, a Western Digital company, held a press briefing in a bespoke London hotel for selected industry outlets for the launch of their new WD Purple™ range of 3.5-inch, high-capacity hard drives for surveillance applications.
But why is there a need for a hard drive specifically designed for surveillance? The answer was simply explained by Jermaine Campbell, WD Country Manager for the UK, “Most hard drives are designed for equal amounts of read and write activity at best, surveillance is different because 90% of the activity is writing data to the drive and this brings very real challenges if you want complete reliability especially if you are working with networks of up to 32 HD cameras as data writing is a more complex and intensive activity. WD Purple hard drives are specifically designed to do just that.”
They are available in capacities from 1 TB up to a market beating 4 TB and are equipped with an array of exclusive WD technologies, including:
- AllFrame™ – which, when combined with ATA streaming support, AllFrame™ technology helps to reduce video footage loss using a proprietary cache policy management technology to help improve data flow and playback. WD Purple includes exclusive firmware upgrades that protect against video pixilation and interruptions within a surveillance system
- Advanced Format Technology™ (AFT) – the more efficient media format that enables increased areal densities, adopted by WD and other drive manufacturers to continue growing hard drive capacitiesEngineered for Compatibility and Reliability
Engineered for Compatibility and Reliability
The WD Purple range is built for easy integration into new or existing video surveillance systems and are compatible with industry-leading chassis and chip-sets.
Without a current industry standard, WD worked closely with surveillance partners to develop a proprietary benchmark to define and demonstrate performance in surveillance systems.
Tests of WD Purple hard drives indicate superior performance to current market storage designed for surveillance use and in tests this performance improved dramatically when camera and channel count and therefore drive workloads increase. So confident are they that the drives come with a 3 year warranty.
So the must have mark for future image storage devices for surveillance will be the WD Purple mark.
For more information visit www.wd.com.
