WD Purple 6TB Surveillance Hard Drive RAID Review

Introduction

We have already had the pleasure to see how WD’s 6TB Purple surveillance hard disk performed in our previous review, but WD was kind enough to provide us with two of these drives and thereby allowing us to test them in a RAID environment too. A surveillance setup will rarely consist of just one hard drive, making this review one to take a closer look at before investing in your future surveillance storage.

With two drives at our disposal, we can run them as in RAID 1 and RAID 0 setups, depending on whether we want speed and storage or redundancy. There isn’t one setup that is better than another, it comes down to what you need in your setup. Most people will probably get more drives and opt for a RAID 5, RAID 6, or RAID 10 setup, but those are out of our reach when working with just two drives.

Whether you want to protect your personal assets and loved ones or monitor the business you worked hard to build, you’ll want surveillance-class storage to rely on. Not only are these drives built for 24/7 usage in environments with up to 8 disks, they also come with enhanced firmware built just for this kind of operation. When it comes to surveillance, every frame counts, and every frame has to be perfect. This is especially noticeable when many cameras are using the drives simultaneously. WD’s Purple series has no trouble here and it is designed to work in setups with up to 32 HD cameras.

The WD Purple 6TB surveillance drive features 64MB cache and uses the well-known WD IntelliPower system for the spindle speed. It is rated for a sustained transfer speed of up to 175MB/s and comes with a power draw of 5.3W in operation, 4.9W when idle, and 0.4W in standby or sleep mode. The noise level is rated to 45 dBA idle and 26 dBA seeking, so they’re barely audible. With a weight of 750 grams, the WD Purple 6TB isn’t the lightest drive, but that’s no surprise considering the capacity.

Western Digital also designed the Purple series to work in high-temperature environments. The temperature rating of the drive, on the base casting, ranges from zero to 65 degrees Celcius when operating and -40 to 70 when non-operating. The Purple series has a mean time before failure of 1 million hours and can withstand 300,000 load/unload cycles. On top of that you also get a two-year limited warranty.

One of the things that make the WD Purple series so great is the exclusive AllFrame technology that works with ATA streaming to reduce error pixelation and video interruptions that easily occur when desktop drives are incorrectly used in security systems. Missed frames and lost footage is a serious problem when an event occurs and surveillance footage needs to be retrieved. WD Purple with AllFrame provides the confidence you should expect when it’s time to play back and review critical surveillance footage.

AllFrame Features:

• Reduces video frame loss with surveillance-class storage.
• Specifically tuned for surveillance security systems.
• Caching algorithms are tuned for write-intensive, low bit rate, high stream count applications that are typical of surveillance applications.
• Priority change for write allocations and preemptive caching policies.
• TLER & ATA streaming support.
• Supports up to eight drives.

Specifications

The specifications are taken directly from the manufacturers homepage at the time of the review and might as such be subject to possible future changes.