BIOS: Technology Means Business

Seagate Technology has announced the SV35 Series hard disk drive (HDD), specifically designed for optimal performance in the commercial video security market. The SV35 Series offers 160GB, 250GB and 500GB of storage, which allows for up to 23 days of high quality continuous video recording.

Video security technology is making a rapid shift from legacy tape based systems to digital systems employing hard drive storage. According to number crunchers, the estimated worldwide market for video surveillance equipment is $4.5 billion at the factory level with a compound average growth rate of 18 per cent. This equates to a lot a dollar!

Further, when you take out the analogue portion of this market and look just at digital systems, the market is growing at more than double this rate or approximately 42 per cent (CAGR). As this transition accelerates, advanced applications have come on the scene providing law enforcement and security professional’s new capabilities in fighting crime and keeping people safe.

Digital video security systems now enable sophisticated software capabilities to automatically preview and flag security events in seconds, where manually reviewed images would have taken many days or even months to discover similar information.

High resolution image capture is moving the quality of stored video from grainy and marginally useful to crisp and incredibly detailed images used to capture criminals, save lives and improve business practices in a wide variety of industries. At the heart of these capabilities are massive hard disk drives, enabling the storage of incredible amounts of digital video data while also providing unprecedented fast access and review of recorded video not possible on legacy tape based systems.

Seagate’s SV35 Series hard disk drives implement a unique combination of features to improve performance, power management and reliability for surveillance digital video recorders (SDVRs), claims the company. And as a distinct product family, the SV35 Series is poised to develop new features and functionality independent of other market segments, increasing its capabilities in meeting the unique needs of video security and surveillance customers in the future.

The SV35 Series hard drives have the same top performance characteristics of desktop drives while also offering other features unique to digital video recording. Currently, the surveillance market is relying on hard drives that are not customised for their specific needs.

Commercial video recording applications combine intense video streaming requirements with the need to also read and write traditional data structures used to manage video databases and related applications. Optimal performance can only be achieved by tuning the read and write strategies to the type of data being used at any given point in time. Seagate’s SV35 Series hard drive supports the ATA 7 command set, which provides for tuning the read/write profile to be video or data specific. This means that video read/writes are designed to stream reliably, while data read/writes are optimised for data integrity.

Digital video recording systems for surveillance are often design to include multiple hard drives to store the massive amounts of information collected. This can result in difficult power management challenges both at system start time as well as during operation.

Seagate’s SV35 Series hard drive provides a low start-up current (~2.0A) that enables the design of efficient, low cost power supplies. In addition, the SV35 Series enables real-time power saving features to allow any drive in the system to spin down into power saving mode when not in active use. This allows for much more efficient system cooling, which in turn can dramatically improve overall system reliability.

The Seagate SV35 Series will begin shipping in April 2006.

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