14 DAY TRIAL // Consumers may know Seagate due to all the HDDs it released for desktops and laptops, but the corporation wouldn't be one of the top two providers of magnetic storage devices if it didn't serve other markets as well.
The surveillance industry is one that relies on recordings. A lot. Magnetic tape storage is one way to preserve recordings for posterity, but the technology isn't the most accessible and easy to use.
That's why recording systems and servers use hard disk drives instead, and tape recording just for backups and long-term storage.
Seagate has just unveiled a series of HDDs made for surveillance systems. They don't have any sort of grand name. They are literally called Seagate Surveillance HDDs.
The drive not only has all the standard abilities of an HDD (storing, reading, etc.), but can recover data as well, in case it was lost due to accidental failures or malicious attacks.
The process is called Seagate Rescue and can restore data in about two weeks, depending on the type of recovery. The success rate is of over 90%, if you can believe it. The rescue plan provides three years' worth of data recovery and it activates upon purchase.
The technical details about the Seagate Surveillance HDDs
The storage devices support up to 32 channels, and thus, can read and write data at a higher rate than normal storage units. The exact speeds weren't mentioned in the press release though.
What Seagate did specify, however, is that the newcomers are very good in multi-drive setups (RAID), even those of up to 16 drives, thanks to rotational vibration (RV) sensors. Optional R/V sensors and the Seagate Rescue service only bring data integrity even higher.
All in all, the newcomer has 1 million hours MTBF (mean time between failures), and thus, works in the field of professional storage applications/surveillance systems for extended time periods easily.
For those who want more specs, here are the barebones: 128 MB cache memory, 8W average power consumption, SATA 6Gb/s support. The actual read and write speeds were not specified, and they aren't on the product page either. Probably because they hinge too much on the system setup, the network speed and the type of RAID mode selected.
Availability
The Seagate Surveillance HDDs should be up for sale soon, by the end of the year or so. If you're in a hurry though, you can get 1 TB to 4 TB models already.