Western Digital Now Has 12TB Purple Surveillance HDDs

Larger Capacity 12TB Purple Drives for AI Systems

Western Digital is expanding their hard disk drive portfolio once again with new 12TB drives. These are specifically for emerging DVR systems that feature AI capabilities. Western Digital’s Purple line has been making surveillance-specific drives for a while now. These can withstand 24/7 use, higher temperatures, have lower power consumption, and are much more reliable in these applications.

These new WD Purple range in particular supports up to 64 cameras with workloads of up to 360TB/year. In terms of Mean-Time-Before-Failure (MTBF), it has a 1.5 million hour rating. Just how reliable are these drives? Their non-recoverable read error-per-bits rating is less than 1 in 1015. Meaning that one bit read every 1,000,000,000,000,000 bits could have a problem. Which is significantly lower in comparison to desktop drives.

“Network video recording systems are getting smart,” says Brendan Collins, vice president product marketing, devices business unit, Western Digital. “AI-enabled NVRs are being architected for new GPUs and CPUs to improve overall deep-learning capability and to speed algorithms related to object recognition and facial recognition. NVRs with deep learning require greater storage capacity and more sophisticated processing, versus individual cameras, to perform more advanced analytics, such as location of an individual face image from weeks or months of stored video, or creation of traffic heat maps from hours of retail surveillance video.”

How Much Are These Western Digital Purple Drives?

The 12TB WD Purple surveillance-class drives (model number WD121PURZ) are available for $479 USD each. There is also a smaller 10TB capacity Purple drive (model number WD101PURZ) available for a $399 USD.