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Hard surveillance bargains

Digital video surveillance today is widely used to enhance the physical security and safety of government institutions, corporations, public spaces and even schools and private homes.

Digital surveillance has made a rapid transition from high-cost analogue to more affordable digital security systems. With increased presence and enhanced requirements of modernised closed-circuit television (CCTV) systems, there is a need for specialised HDDs with more storage capacity and advanced features designed specifically for surveillance mediums.

Today’s systems deliver a comprehensive range of features and capabilities such as high-resolution image quality, streaming video from multiple cameras, video archiving with ultra-fast data access and on-demand video playback.

Surveillance drives are available in three distinct classes: AV-class, enterprise class, and solid state. Irrespective of the industry, the vast majority of surveillance systems used worldwide fall into one of six types. These include:

* A standalone digital video recorder (DVR) records video streams from one or more cameras. The video is recorded onto up to six hard drives, which are housed in the device itself.

* Hybrid and PC-based SDVR systems integrate analogue and digital video sources and provide local playback and search features on a PC. AV-class storage and solid state storage are commonly used for these systems.

* Network video recorders (NVRs) and video management systems (VMS) are systems that provide active analysis of recorded video, such as people counting, licence plate recognition and monitoring of virtual boundaries. These advanced systems are used by governments, as well as casinos and commercial buildings, airports and manufacturing plants. AV-class storage as well as enterprise-class storage are best suited for these applications and are RAID-ready.

* Mobile SDVR systems are used in vehicles and transportation systems such as police cars, armoured trucks, trains, buses and airlines, as well as military vehicles and vessels. This environment is typically hostile, such as high-motion or extreme temperature environments and solid state storage has been proven to be the best solution for these conditions to avoid disk failure.

* Finally, surveillance storage expansion drives are external drives with AV-class storage inside and are engineered for 24x7 use. Because the solution is external, storage can be scaled as the need arises, or archived for analysis. These external drives are typically USB-enabled.

In closing, surveillance based hard drives are the foundations that deliver the superior performance, added capacity, and enhanced reliability that surveillance applications require.

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