The hard disk drive (HDD), a critical component in a video surveillance system, has become more powerful and reliable thanks to newer and more advanced technology, said Patrick Lo, Director of Marketing for APAC at Western Digital. One such technology is error detection, which allows a system to detect an impending
The hard disk drive (HDD), a critical component in a video surveillance system, has become more powerful and reliable thanks to newer and more advanced technology, said Patrick Lo, Director of Marketing for APAC at Western Digital.
One such technology is error detection, which allows a system to detect an impending HDD failure. “To make sure that error detection works, the HDD must be able to ‘shake hands' with the error detection software developed by the system manufacturer,” Lo said. “We do not just sell HDDs. In this industry, we sell a service and work with system manufacturers from the very beginning during the R&D stage.”
Power management, meanwhile, prolongs HDD's life expectancy and helps conserve energy. “It's a topic that, for surveillance players, will never go out of style,” Lo said, adding to lower overall power consumption, HDD manufacturers have developed various technologies, including a mechanism to reduce the disk's spin-up power.
Moreover, effective and accurate writing into the hard drive is critical. “Sometimes the HDD will keep recording, yet frame drops may occur, and that can be a huge problem,” Lo said, adding WD has a solution, called AllFrame, to address this issue.
The major difference between HDDs for consumer and surveillance applications is that the former is reading intensive. Yet, “for surveillance applications, the customer needs an HDD that writes data 90 percent of the time, while reading accounts for just 10 percent or even 5 percent,” he noted.