Surveillance is something that has been around for decades. From monitoring our houses, businesses and public places, surveillance has taken a very essential spot in today's day and age.
Few years ago, at the very most, it would be police or security agencies who were using surveillance systems to protect people in crowded public spaces, or a corporation using the system for its own security mechanism. But today, even households and apartment buildings use surveillance systems.
With the increase in the demand for surveillance, the technology also kept improving. From small, grainy CCTV cameras to high definition cameras, surveillance technology has come a long way. But in this entire progress, one demand has always stayed constant, the demand for reliable storage. Video surveillance is pointless if the video content cannot be stored reliably. When a drive is formatted, multiple zones are created that include a varying number of sectors per track, based on location.
The Streaming Command Set includes tables that describe these zones and the average seek time from track to track. By knowing exactly how long it will take to access data, the surveillance system can optimize its transfers.
There is also a Configure Stream command that allows the host to set the number of simultaneous read or write streams. This knowledge lets the drive configure its buffers accordingly. But, at the end of the day, surveillance customers don't care about how ATA commands are implemented. They don't care about access times or data rates. They care about recording and, in turn, playing back video. Not to sound too dramatic, but the difference between a bad guy getting caught and him getting away can be a few frames of a capture. If your surveillance system cannot keep up with every single frame of video, you are taking on risk. To this end, storage manufactures have begun to realize the need for hard drives specially designed for surveillance systems.
One of the major hard drive disks created for this, is the Seagate Surveillance HDD systems. Keen followers would have realized that Seagate has changed its naming strategies recently. While Barracuda, Constellation, and Savvio are no more, replaced by to-the-point labels like Enterprise Capacity and Enterprise Performance. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that surveillance specific hard drives were named Surveillance HDD. It is a 7th generation system that makes progress in the earlier SV35 series.
Seagate is able to stream from 32 cameras/channels simultaneously, and the Surveillance HDD is rated for 24/7 operation.While the competition has chosen to focus on read/write optimization Seagate has put its focus solely on write-heavy operations, which they claim is the most essential task in surveillance. While Seagate doesn't have any of the useful tools on its site to help you select a drive, the company does provide quite a few white papers that present similar ideas. In its Safe and Smart Surveillance Drive Selection Guide, you can see that the Surveillance HDD is positioned between the Video 2.5/3.5 HDD and the Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD. Seagate's Video 2.5/3.5 HDDs are lower-power, lower-cost alternatives, while the Enterprise Capacity 3.5 is meant for large enterprise deployments.Another point worth noting is that Surveillance HDD has rotational vibration (RV) sensors. Their inclusion allows Seagate to support up to 16 Surveillance HDDs in a single system. Seagate also supports Idle3 spin control, decreasing time-to-ready so that the storage system can go into low-power modes more often without the threat of losing camera data during motion detection.
Conclusion :
Seagate is going after pure write-intensive applications with its Surveillance HDD. In our transfer rate test, the Seagate disk is 15-20% faster than competition. 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 the winner when it comes to raw scalability.
If you are interested in buying a Seagate product, visit their website here. You can view the video below to make a informed choice while buying a surveillance HDD :
Read the above given comparison chart for buying Seagate :
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