High-Capacity Hard Drives Built With Surveillance In Mind
Even though the surveillance storage market would appear to have a very narrow focus, both WD and Seagate made interesting design choices that match their vision of the market.
With WD, you have the Purple line of surveillance-oriented hard drives that are optimized for simultaneous read/write performance. Looking at our performance results, workloads that stress the Purple up to a certain point are handled with great responsiveness. This is largely thanks to the company's AllFrame technology, which streamlines performance based off of a known workload. Once you exceed the drive's performance boundaries, less ideal results start cropping up. One big advantage favoring the Purple, however, is power consumption. It draws one-third less power than the Surveillance HDD.
Seagate, on the other hand, is going after pure write-intensive applications with its Surveillance HDD. In our transfer rate test, the Seagate disk is 15-20% faster than WD's Purple. And when you stress the Surveillance HDD, it responds more gracefully, kicking back fewer outliers. Seagate also wins points for including RV sensors that enable RAID arrays of up to 16 drives in a single system. As a result, the Surveillance HDD is more scalable than the Purple.
Overall, deciding between the Purple and the Surveillance HDD comes down to your application. With fewer than eight drives, under a known read/write workload, the WD Purple stands out. Going beyond eight drives with a write-only workload definitely favors the Seagate Surveillance HDD. In both cases, the two drives offer great surveillance performance, exceeding what you'd see from mainstream desktop drives, while selling for far less than their enterprise-class siblings.
