Surveillance Data Finds a Home on Seagate Hard Drives

Seagate's new storage line is aimed to address organizations' increasing security needs for video data.

To help address the growing interest in heightened security and the corresponding move by organizations to record and store volumes of data onto video, Seagate Technology announced on March 1 its new SV35 Series hard drive product family.

The new drives are designed to boost the performance and capacity of devices related to video surveillance.

Seagates SV35 Series name stands for "Security Video" Series with a 3.5-inch disk.

The new hard drives are currently available and are being manufactured in three different models: hard drives with 160GB, 250GB or 500GB of capacity.

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The latter provides up to 23 straight days of continuous video recording, while the lower-end SV35 hard drive models offer fewer days of uninterrupted recording.

Click here to read about Seagates notebook PC hard drives.

In many ways the video security technology arena is following the same path as disk-based storage systems—removing the reliance upon tape systems for playback, archiving and long-term storage purposes.

Moving video security operations onto small hard drives offers a number of benefits, including better resolution via hi-definition formats, quicker searches, simplified flags and previews, and less manual intervention, said Rob Pait, director of Global Consumer Electronics Market for Seagate, based in Scotts Valley, Calif.

"This is really gaining traction because the whole world is paying more attention to security. The amount of security data that is inundating companies that are concerned with that type of information is staggering," Pait said.

Pait said the SV35 Series is leveraged from Seagates line of desktop and enterprise drives and supports "intense" video streaming capabilities. The hard drives are tuned using the standard ATA7 command set to allow sturdier video durability.

Also, the drives have been optimized to understand when the device is writing data rather than writing video through advanced error-checking methods commonly found on PCs or servers. This allows the drive to intelligently switch modes between data read/write and video read/write memory.

Seagates acquisition of Maxtor is expected to bring market leverage. Read more here.

Power management capabilities of the SV35 have been addressed by the inclusion of an ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) on the drive which limits the start-up current to only 2 amps, thus lowering power supply costs. In addition, the SV35 portfolio features added cooling functionality.

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