Seagate unveils enlarged spy drive with support for 64 spycams Seagate has launched an 8TB disk drive for surveillance use, enabling up to 6PB of CCTV data in a rack. This is a 3.5-inch form-factor drive and joins the existing set of 8TB Archive, Enterprise Capacity, Enterprise NAS and Kinetic disk drives. It follows on from the 6TB model announced in September last year. That had 6 …
"64 cameras supported"
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"Western Digital has a 6TB surveillance drive spinning at around 5,900rpm (IntelliPower) and supporting 32 CCTV cameras. A 6TB Purple NV (Network Video-recorder) model supports 64 cameras."
What do they mean, has the ISO launched a CCTV camera quantifier to its list?
Quite. And "Supports X Cameras" sounds very like a memory card being sold as "Store 36 billion tunes!" or "Super XXX 48x MEGA ULTRA SPEED!" Unless there are actually X physical plugs on the outside that the cameras plug into, then all you are telling me is the speed of the drive, in a way which makes less sense than just reporting the speed of the drive.
Last time I checked specs of a regular Seagate HDD and an equivalent model made for surveillance, they were identical but for one thing: while their AFR (MTBF) was nominally the same, the conditions for the regular drive assumed 8h of use per day, whereas the video variety said 24/7 use. My conclusion is that the "video drives" are made to a higher standard.
No, the video drives aren't made to a higher standard, they just charge a bit more to account for the larger failure rate they'll see due to 24x7 use. There are some that are made differently, but it isn't made with better components, they simply have reduced advertised capacity to allow for additional ECC bits and spare tracks that help them take longer before throwing off unrecoverable errors.
Sounds like a very tall rack. Assuming 60 drives in a 4U box, gives around 400TB per 4U after taking RAID into account. Putting these into a 42U rack without servers or other hardware only gets 4PB per rack.
Not sure where the numbers of supported cameras comes from. It will depend on drive cache and seek speeds as each camera can be expected to produce sequential writes to the disk, but to switch cameras the drive will need to seek to another part of the disk.
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