Digital surveillance in the modern era has become more demanding and looks for a more robust storage system to store long term footages, and good archiving systems. A highly reliable surveillance system depends on its storage. The Surveillance system uses a large number of drives, and the drives firmware is custom built for streaming video, and hence more emphasis is laid on capturing every pixel of the video.
Seagate, founded in 1979, is the leading provider of hard drives and Storage Solutions. They provide industries broadest range of hard disk drives for companies and small businesses.
Seagate offers storage to support a variety of systems; which support video and analytics. The drives support various applications which include surveillance DVRs (SDVR), network video recorders (NVR), and centralized or cloud surveillance for video data analytics.
The New Generation Seagate Surveillance Drive
Seagate introduces a complete surveillance storage portfolio for security, safety and video analytics. It drives and delivers optimized performance and surveillance scenario with improved reliability. The Surveillance Hard Drive (HD) is a seventh-generation of 6TB Seagate Drive that addresses the increasing need for high-resolution cameras and promises cost effective performance. The key features are
- Up to 16 drives and 32 cameras per system are supported by the 6TB capacity drives
- They are very highly tuned for high write surveillance workloads
- They have support for RAID and perform reliably in multi-drive systems
- Rotational vibration sensors are present for reliable performance
- They have customized power settings to support motivation-activated cameras with Idle 3 – Support
- In the event of data loss or accident, they supplement backups with Seagate Data Rescue Plan
What are the Smart Drive Selection Options that you have
Surveillance DVRs (SDVR):
- Surveillance Digital Video Recorders or SDVRs, are systems which help enable significant cost and space savings when capacity and scalability are not the very top priorities.
- There is support of up to 32 cameras for single drive
- These are the Seagate Surveillance HDD and SV35 Series drive
Network Video Recorders:
- NVRs support the usage of up to 32 cameras in their multi-drive system to maximize space video recordings that have been networked
- These are the Surveillance HDD and Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD
Centralized Storage for Video Analytics:
- Here you make use of the large amount of enormous video data stored and analyze it.
- Used to predict and improve traffic movement in cities and big stores can make plan to layout merchandise in a more planned and compelling ways with the help of 100+ cameras
- These are the Surveillance HDD and Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD
More details will be given below as we study the various Surveillance Systems.
To choose and pick the best drive, you have to carefully understand your systems requirements. You have to keep a tab on how often will the cameras be running and recording, how long to you want to keep the footage, how many drives can your system support etc. These questions will help you understand which of the Seagate’s drives will be best suited for your system, from the mentioned above three kinds of drives.
It is also important to note what kind of performance is expected out of the system. To determine, you need to know the workload of a security system, will the system be used for video analytics such as features like facial recognition, or just recording content and playback is enough when there is some incident review. All these requirements allow you to decide what kind of requirements is expected out of your drive. If all these are yes, then you would need high definition video recording, and intelligent video analytics, in addition to this, to store this metadata in an intelligent surveillance solution, we also need a relational database, which ensure high performance, error detection, correction and data integrity.
The Workload will also have implications on the system design. Surveillance applications expect 24×7 support and likewise applications that stream continuous video to a centralized location need higher storage capacities, remote access and data replication. These voluminous storage demands and ever-increasing file sizes demand drives with outstanding throughput as well as error correction features to ensure that data integrity is maintained during transmission of data. The SATA drives with the VLSI technology take care of performance, reliability, flexibility and integrity.
There are some important considerations while choosing the right drive for your Surveillance systems. The portfolio has various options to suit your requirements.
Video 3.5 HDD
It is specifically used for video applications and world’s first 4TB Drive.
Used in
- Surveillance systems for homes
- Digital video recorders for consumers
- Set-top boxes for cable Televisions
- Media Centers and Servers
It delivers
- HD content delivered in 18 simultaneous streams
- Designed for 6 bay systems, and almost silent acoustics
- Video storage solution of 4TB
- 24*7 operation
Video 2.5 HDD
It is fine tuned to deliver 24×7 streaming, with high reliability and used for end users and system integrators, which consumes 55% less power ensuring smooth data delivery, with a media streaming optimized for 12HD streams.
Used in
- PCs for Home Cinema
- Audio Jukeboxes and Karaoke
- IPTV, Cable and Satellite TV Set-top boxes
- Media center and DVR applications
3.5 HDD Enterprise Capacity
They support highest volume and highest density of storage with a great ROI which have 3.5 inch capacity optimized hard drives of 6TB.
- Up to 100 plus cameras are supported
- Interface of SAS and SATA
- Support 10 plus bay systems
- Highly reliable, secure, scalable and provide excellent performance
- Provides 24×7 reliability
Who would need it?
- Huge Government Organizations
- Customers having bulk storage and data centers
- Corporate Organizations producing huge voluminous date
Problems usually being faced by people using the Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD are
- High running costs
- Very high power consumption
- Data growth that is happening rapidly
Seagate Surveillance HDD
It is designed to perform and excel in 24×7 environments on multi-drive Surveillance solutions. They are used by
- Huge State, Commercial and Government establishments planning to build Video Surveillance solutions
- Establishments bidding for Surveillance projects and manufacturers and distributors
These 4TB Surveillance HDDs are used to serve high write work cycles. They support RAID and upto 32 HD cameras. They support 16 drives and around 32 cameras per drive.
People using Surveillance HDD are trying to solve problems on Scalability, multi-camera support and reliability. They are ideal in the DVR and NVR segments.
Key things to be considered when opting for Seagate Surveillance HDD
- What infrastructure do you have for building the Surveillance system, and what surveillance system are you using currently?
- What is the biggest hurdle or difficulty in setting up Surveillance systems in your Organization? And what requirements do you currently have that need to be addressed?
Testimonials by March Networks
March Networks have recently introduced Seagate Surveillance HDDs into their retail banking environment. It implements the Seagate 3.5 Video HDD. They provide 24*7 operations and upto 4TB of capacity at affordable prices for the company as well as it clients. They have also introduced Surveillance HDDs for their retail and banking customers, and it has provided them high scalability at affordable rates which handles high-write workloads with efficient performance. Using the leading HDDs from Seagate, March Networks saves money, achieves its storage needs, at improved performance, and at a much affordable cost. It gives them improved reliability in the most rugged environments on multi-drive systems.
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