Western Digital Announces Purple Storage Line Additions

Today, Western Digital (WD) announced additions to its family of WD Purple storage solutions. The new additions consist of an 18TB HDD and a 1TB microSD, both due out later this year. The gold line got 18TB HDDs a few months ago as well. Western Digital was founded 50 years ago as General Digital. Since then, it has become a household name, providing digital storage devices for everything from home use to the data center.

Today, Western Digital (WD) announced additions to its family of WD Purple storage solutions. The new additions consist of an 18TB HDD and a 1TB microSD, both due out later this year. The gold line got 18TB HDDs a few months ago as well. Western Digital was founded 50 years ago as General Digital. Since then, it has become a household name, providing digital storage devices for everything from home use to the data center.

Western Digital’s Purple drives are targeted at surveillance and camera use. WD’s Purple line of HDDs primarily distinguishes themselves from other WD drives with a higher workload rating. The smaller HDDs have workload ratings of up to 180TB/year. The larger HDDs support twice that, 360TB/year. The storage mediums are also tuned for write-intensive, low bit-rate, high stream-count applications typical to most surveillance applications.

Western Digital’s Purple 18TB HDD will be joining their existing lineup of drives, which currently ranges from 1TB to 14TB on their online store. Curiously, WD seems to have skipped over providing a 16TB purple HDD. Like all of WD purple drives of 8TB or larger, the upcoming 18TB drive will use the company’s “AllFrame AI” drive technology to provide support for write streams from up to 64 HD cameras. The drive also supports 32 streams for deep learning analytics. The new HDD is due out sometime next month.

The upcoming Western Digital Purple 1TB microSD card is due out before the end of the year. Currently, WD is targeting a November release. The new 1TB microSD card is, like all WD purple products, targeted at the surveillance market. In this case, WD is hoping it will find a home in AI-enabled cameras, surveillance cameras, and edge devices where it can serve as either primary or back-up data storage. In keeping with its expected use-cases, the card is rated for 500 P/E cycles. WD also claims the card is weather-resistant, humidity resistant and can withstand temperatures from -25° degrees to 85° degrees C. In compatible cameras, the card health monitor provides installers and integrators with the ability to gauge the remaining endurance. It joins the existing lineup of Purple microSD cards from Western Digital, which currently spans a range of sizes from 32GB to 512GB.

Availability

WD Purple 18TB HDD – October 2020.

WD Purple SC QD101 1TB microSD card – November 2020.

WD Purple at Amazon

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