As the video surveillance market heads for increased use of HD and 4K UHD devices, so the need for increased storage becomes increasingly important. The good news for the security market is that HDD capacities are continuing to rise, and will do so at a faster rate than mainstream video installations. The increased workloads and the need for continuity, make surveillance-rated drives a vital commodity. Now Seagate offers a 10TB version of its SkyHawk product.
When digital archiving first became commonplace in the surveillance sector, storage was expensive and hard drives often exhibited short lifecycles. Built for occasional data writing, the drives of the day were not suited to 24 hour writing as is typical of a security recording schedule. With DVRs often put into enclosed spaces, drives regularly overheated or simply failed because of the workload.
At the time many in the security industry placed the blame at the feet of the manufacturers, but the reality was the HDDs built for personal computing were simply too frail and unreliable for the particular demands of around-the-clock video archiving.
The performance of HDDs improved as manufacturers designed products for heavier duty applications such as AV, and data centres created a lucrative demand for drives with increased write cycles. The technologies used in such products formed the basis of products that could be adapted to meet the security market’s needs.
Thankfully, several manufacturers of HDDs have identified that the surveillance market-place is a lucrative one, and surveillance rated HDDs are no longer an oddity. Indeed, an increasing number of end users are insisting that all video surveillance archiving makes use of appropriately specified HDDs.
Seagate’s SkyHawk range of surveillance HDDs are available with a range of capacities, including 10TB models. To put this into perspective, the manufacturer estimates that a single drive can store up to 2,000 hours of HD quality video to specifications that would be suited for security use.
Drives can support up to 64 streams and have a write-cycle which allows the HDD to record 90 per cent of the time, which represents typical usage for many security applications.
Enhanced vibration tolerance makes the SeaHawk range ideal for systems with multiple HDDs, and an operational temperature of up to 70 degrees C reduces the risk of drives overheating.
The SeaHawk range is also available with Seagate’s recovery services which offers a solution in many disaster scenarios.