Seagate SkyHawk AI 12TB surveillance hard drive.

Surveillance Pro

Drive Class: Surveillance Pro

Hard drive manufacturers design drives that will perform well for their largest customers, or sets of customers. This is why “classes” of drives exist.

Design Expectations

The information below is a high-level set of expectations the drive manufacturers have when designing, testing, and selling “Surveillance Pro” drives.

Surveillance Pro
Power On Hours24 hrs/7 days (8760 POH)
Write / Read Ratio90/10
Block SizesRandom
Seek ProfileRAID Striped w/Parity

Design Details

In the early HDD based surveillance recording devices, analog cameras with low resolution ruled. In today’s high bandwidth NVRs, with their high resolution, high camera counts, and RAID enabled file systems, an enterprise drive has been the best choice. Selected for its robustness and several key hardware features, such as fixed shaft spindle motors and hardware rotational vibration sensors, the Enterprise class drives have been needed in these high-capacity systems. But what about that custom firmware tuning for video stream recognition and the market’s tolerance for cost? Is Mainstream Enterprise the only option?

Surveillance Pro Class Drives

Enter Surveillance Pro class drives. These brand-new models are the drive industry’s answer to the call for a hybrid drive that features the hardware necessary to survive in a high density, enterprise IT-like chassis but is still tuned and designed exclusively for the AV/surveillance industry. These unique models offer the best overall combination of hardware, firmware, factory screening, and cost optimization for the high-end Surveillance NVR system.

Surveillance Pro
Production Screening?YES
Rated for 24/7 Use?YES
Fixed Shaft Spindle?YES
RV Feed Forward Sensors?YES
Time Limited Retry Tables?YES
Workload RatingVERY HIGH
Firmware TuningVIDEO with RAID
Performance CapabilitiesMEDIUM
Reliability RatingsHIGH
CostMEDIUM