Red, silver, white, blue. The promise of flexibility, capacity and performance. Names that reference nature’s fiercest predators. These are characteristics reflected by the dozens of hard drives on the market today. But what do these qualities reveal about the capabilities of a hard drive, and how can professionals choose the best drive for a particular surveillance application?
When selecting a hard drive, it’s important to consider your system’s workload, configuration, capacity requirements and drive count. While some products are advertised across market segments, there are benefits to choosing a drive designed with your system’s specific needs in mind.
Comparison of Drive Offerings
Products like the Seagate Pipeline HD drives are optimal examples of hard drives designed primarily for consumer electronics environments, including DVRs, home theater PCs and media centers. The Pipeline HD drive is the industry’s leading consumer video storage device thanks to its 24x7 quiet operation, energy efficiency, competitive pricing and world-class reliability. With capacities up to 2TB, low power consumption and cool operation, these drives can be useful for small embedded surveillance systems with low camera counts and can stream up to 12 simultaneous HD streams to support multiple camera feeds.
On the opposite end of the spectrum are high-end products like Seagate Constellation ES drives– capacity-optimized 2TB and 3TB enterprise drives well-suited for bulk-data centers, enterprise external storage arrays, cloud storage and centralized surveillance systems. Constellation ES drives offer the highest performance on sequential read/write applications (6Gb/s on SAS and SATA) and enterprise-class reliability. They also feature government-grade encryption to secure critical data, enhanced RAID functionality, and best-in-class rotational and linear vibration tolerance for environments with high drive counts.
For professionals seeking a drive to support a mainstream SDVR application, Seagate SV35 Series drives offer the industry’s only surveillance-optimized platform for this setup. These drives offer a dedicated design at only a slight cost premium over budget-priced desktop drives. With 1TB-per-disk technology, they provide cost-effective capacities up to 3TB and increased video rates enabled by the SATA 6Gb/s interface. SV35 Series drives are designed for 24x7 surveillance applications and maintain one million hours MTBF. Operation is enhanced with 64MB of cache, a new dual core processor and surveillance-optimized write caching, making them ideal for surveillance environments with up to six drives that demand high performance and HD streaming support.
Video surveillance storage workloads are heavily biased for writing—a function representing up to 95% of the drive’s operation. SV35 Series drives are fine-tuned for these high-write workloads and have high-performance, large-block sequential tuning for multiple video stream recording.
Conclusion
With the many products on the market, knowing your system’s storage needs is key. Choosing a hard drive with application-specific features will contribute to greater performance and overall value.
http://www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/consumer-electronics/sv35/?cmpid=ctc-_-AS-Oct12