New Western Digital Purple 8TB Hard Drive

[Kieran]

Western Digital Release 8TB Purple Hard Drive

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Storage has always been one of the most important factors to consider when designing a CCTV system, particularly one involving IP cameras. Now, with the advent of 4K CCTV, the industry is seeing an increasing demand for even greater storage capacity to accommodate the growing resolution.​

Western Digital's Purple series is designed specifically for the intense demands of a CCTV system and are our recommended hard drive, and until recently the maximum storage capacity achievable was a system using their 6TB drive. This ceiling has just been broken with Western Digital's new 8TB Hard Drive, the WD80PUZX.

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We've recently had a test of the 8TB drive on our demo system to check compatibility with our two most popular storage options for IP CCTV, a Synology NAS drive and a Hikvision NVR, and we're happy to report that the new 8TB works perfectly fine with both of them.

Below is an image from a Hikvision NVR's web access, showing that the 8TB drive initialised and commenced recording just fine. This was from a DS-7716NI-I4-16P, and so in theory you could connect four of these hard drives to this NVR with a maximum storage capacity of 32TB

We've left this recording for a couple of days and so far we've seen no issues with the Hikvision NVR nor the recordings.

We also tested it in our Synology RS814+ under the same conditions as above and, once again, the WD Purple 8TB was recognised and formatted without any difficulties. This was also compatible with Synology's Surveillance Station package, and recordings quickly appeared on the drive once we had configured the cameras.

We plan on keeping a couple of the 8TB drives in our own demo systems (more storage is always nice!) and so we'll be able to update this thread with any encountered problems down the line. For now though, it's all smooth sailing.

 

[peter]

Thank you for that review. I've an old mac in my office with 5 WD IDE drives in it, 12 years old and still working. Of all the drives I've owned or worked with in a college media suite the ones that have failed predictably have been Seagate. WD keep on trucking.