WD Purple 6TB Surveillance Hard Drive RAID Review

Bohs Hansen / 9 years ago

Final Thoughts

Pricing

At the time of writing, the WD Purple 6TB Surveillance Hard Disk can be found at NewEgg for $256.99, at Overclockers UK for £214.99, or through Geizhals starting from €251.04.

WD_Purple_6TB-Chart-PricePerGB

Conclusion

The 6TB Purple surveillance drive from WD already impressed us in its single drive review and it was no different in this RAID review with two of these great hard disk drives. When it comes to security and safety, there shouldn’t be any compromises and you should pick your medium with care. WD’s Purple series is designed for just this task and after seeing it in RAID action, there is little doubt that Purple is a great choice. The WD Purple 6TB surveillance hard disk is designed to work in harsh environments and always-on scenarios as well as being designed for surveillance systems with up to eight drives and up to 32 HD cameras.

The real strength of this drive, next to being built on a solid hardware foundation, lies within the is the firmware and WD’s exclusive AllFrame technology. It specifically tuned for surveillance security systems and reduces video frame loss. The caching algorithms are tuned for write-intensive, low bit rate, high stream count applications that are typical of surveillance applications and it supports priority change for write allocations and preemptive caching policies as well as TLER & ATA streaming.

We saw a great scalability in our RAID tests with almost double the performance in RAID 0 setups while RAID 1 barely affected the performance. This is a great result, but I hadn’t expected it to be any different after the single drive review.

Pros

Great scalability
Good price per GB of storage
WD AllFrame technology
Up to 8 drives
Up to 32 HD cameras

Cons

none

“Don’t compromise when it comes to safety and surveillance and with WD’s Purple series you don’t need to. You can’t go wrong with a good price per GB coupled with a great performance and an optimized firmware.”