The SV35 Series hard drive is designed to record from multiple surveillance cameras.

In a recent episode of TV's CSI, a parking garage surveillance camera helped capture a serial killer. While Hollywood often stretches reality to the breaking point—it usually takes the CSI cops a mere hour to crack a case—there's no doubt that hard drives play an increasingly important role in the real world of digital detection.

Hard drives for storing video from surveillance cameras have become one of the fastest-growing markets for Seagate®. That's because surveillance DVR (S-DVR) systems are quickly replacing analog tape-based systems because of the speed, storage capacity and power savings advantages offered by hard drives.

IMS Research forecasts that the global market for S-DVR systems will surpass $3 billion by 2010, while the mobile video surveillance market will reach nearly $500 million by 2011.

Seagate is tapping this booming market with a portfolio of specialized hard drives for digital surveillance. The company's next-generation SV35 Series™ hard drives, for example, are designed specifically to record from multiple cameras placed by law-enforcement officials and businesses and search through the recorded images.

Seagate has also broadened offerings to include solutions for enterprise video surveillance and outdoor surveillance.

Long-Lasting Storage
"This market's needs are very unique," said Mark Wojtasiak, a Seagate channel market development manager, "and we've addressed those needs with our SV35 Series drives. The drives consume less power and have been shown to generate less heat, so they'll last longer than conventional drives."

The SV35 Series drive can handle multiple streams of video simultaneously, and its large capacity means video can be archived for long periods; the high-end 1-TB version can store up to 32 days of surveillance video.

"The SV35 Series drive has made surveillance DVRs better and more reliable," said Wojtasiak. "It's like surveillance on steroids."

To the Extreme
The SV35 Series hard drive family is designed for indoor video surveillance—geared for businesses that don't have the need or resources for more complex networked-surveillance systems.

Unlike standard 3.5-inch drives, which are designed for occasional writes from PCs or servers, a video-surveillance system must write to its drive around the clock, said Kevin Lee, managing director of Seagate Asia-Pacific channel sales and marketing,

"For surveillance applications, continuity of video flow is critical," Lee said. "They have to run 24x7—otherwise, you might miss a crucial piece of evidence."

The more compact Seagate 2.5-inch EE25 Series™ hard drive, meanwhile, is ideal for outdoor surveillance, where enclosures (light poles or a bank's ATM camera, for instance) are more limited in space and temperature fluctuations can punish a conventional hard drive. The EE25 Series drive has survived the extreme rigors of Mt. Everest, for example.

The ultra-rugged EE25 Series drive is also ideal for mobile surveillance, where the vibration and shock levels from a police car or military vehicle can challenge a normal drive's performance, said Wojtasiak.

"The EE25 drive fits really well in this market space," he said. "Video streaming isn't as important as the overall ruggedness of the drive."

And where massive amounts of video must be captured in a centralized storage network, Seagate's Barracuda® ES drive is the ideal surveillance solution. Its features address the need for high capacity, reliability, and data integrity in multi-drive systems—an important factor when 10 or more surveillance drives are often put into a chassis.

"A network video recorder has a lot of storage in it," said Wojtasiak. "Network connectivity enables organizations to leverage their existing IT Infrastructure."

The Camera Never Blinks
That means more cameras can be deployed, while increasing the amount of video they capture and retain. Businesses can expand their viewing capabilities so that different security personnel and other users can simultaneously review video footage, across multiple sites.

"Our Barracuda ES drive delivers maximum performance in systems with multiple drives," Wojtaskiak said.

These enterprise surveillance systems include not only mission-critical servers, but also IP-based cameras—ideal for airports, casinos, or retail stores. Retailers are using surveillance cameras, in fact, to do more than protect their merchandise from theft.

"Many retailers routinely use surveillance storage to help them measure store traffic," Wojtasiak said. "They use surveillance cameras, for instance, to monitor their customers' buying patterns. With that data, they can adjust their merchandise displays or marketing tactics to improve sales for a certain demographic they want to reach."

Which makes perfect sense, said Pat King, SVP and GM of Seagate's consumer electronics business unit.

"Surveillance drives are supposed to see everything," he said. "Our goal is to provide the broadest range of hard drives for the unique needs of surveillance video system manufacturers and integrators."