Seagate stresses role of hard disk drive in surveillance

Video surveillance is a vital portion of security, allowing people to monitor and investigate events. Hard disk drives (HDDs), on which videos are stored, have thus become a critical component in surveillance.

“As a result of some of security breaches or natural disasters around the world there's pressure on local law enforcements and industries to better regulate and respond to incidents as they occur,” said CN Chu, Technical Manager at Seagate Taiwan. “The majority of video footage is recorded on a hard drive, meaning the choices you make for storage are critical to ensure that data is reliably recalled when needed.”

According to him, there are significant differences between HDDs for consumer and surveillance use. “Consumer electronics HDDs' primary focus is entertainment systems, like a consumer DVR, where you typically record content and play it back over and over again. In this environment, smooth playback is very important,” he said. “In surveillance, especially embedded DVRs, more than 90 percent of the operation is to ‘write.' Therefore, write performance and data integrity is a major focus to the Surveillance HDD.”

In his words, a good surveillance hard drive must ensure error detection and data recovery, be reliable, and have low power consumption. Among the things that users should look for include data requirements demanded, the level of reliability needed, and length of data retention -- “How long will the video be stored? What environment will it be stored?” Chu said.