Our surveillance hard drive family, most recently updated with the launch of SkyHawk, continues its winning ways. For the third time in the past several months, the drive has won a top industry award—this time from Security Products magazine.
Seagate’s drive recently received a “New Product of the Year” award in the magazine’s Video Surveillance Data Storage category. The magazine’s awards program honors outstanding product-development achievements of security-equipment manufacturers.
Susan May, a marketing director with the magazine, said an independent panel of judges from the security industry evaluated 90 product entries based on features such as “innovation, quality, interoperability, design, technical advances and impact on the security industry.”
Standing Out from the Pack
Aubrey Muhlach, surveillance segment marketing manager at Seagate, said awards from industry experts can help customers understand the product’s advantages in a fragmented market. Seagate’s surveillance drive also has nabbed awards this year from PSI Magazine, whose readers voted it as the Technology Innovation of the Year, and from the Government Security Awards.
“Recognition like this can help make product features and differences clearer for manufacturers and system integrators who are building out surveillance systems piece by piece,” Muhlach explained.
The highest-capacity drive of its kind, Seagate’s SkyHawk is tuned for high-write surveillance workloads of up to 180TB per year—or three times the workload of competing storage solutions—with surveillance-optimized firmware to improve the drive’s reliability. The drive can store up to 2,000 hours of HD video, and it’s the only such product to offer a three-year data recovery plan, which is automatically activated at the time of purchase.
Fast-Growing Market
The market for surveillance drives is growing sharply, as more businesses and government agencies seek to not only protect their assets and people but to analyze all that video content. Market researcher Trendfocus projects that HDD manufacturers will ship approximately 20 million dedicated surveillance drives in 2019, up from 12 million units in 2014.
More and more retailers use HDD-based surveillance cameras to study their customers’ shopping patterns and brand preferences, and transportation departments use surveillance equipment to analyze and predict traffic flow.
“It’s never been more important to have reliable storage available to the surveillance market,” said Muhlach. “Not only has the value of video recordings gone up as video analytics improve, but the increasing number of cameras being installed and longer data-retention periods all help contribute to the power of storage in the surveillance industry.”
