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Smile you're on camera.

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As a person who dislikes having my picture taken, it frightening to imagine that video of me is being recorded far more often than I may realize. Let's look at a typical day. Your drive to work may be recorded by city municipalities analyzing traffic patterns and recorded for local security.  The coffee shop where you pick up your morning rocket fuel has you captured on multiple cameras that feed information to their DVR.  If you work in retail or the hospitality industry you're most likely being recorded all day long. In most professional offices there is recording in public areas. Stop to get gas, groceries or dine out on your way home, you're being recorded on more cameras than you can keep track of. All of this recording and you are not even a contestant on Big Brother with a chance to win $500,000.

The demand for increased commercial and security surveillance can be managed with new technology. Gone are the days where cameras record resolution of 640 x 480 (307,200 pixels) onto VCRs.  High definition is the new standard and camera resolution is measured in megapixels. Today 2+ megapixel cameras are becoming standard and cameras up to 10 megapixels that record at 3,648 x 2,752 (10,039,296 pixels) – nearly five times the resolution of a 1080p image are also being deployed.

Depending on the data retention requirements and number of cameras, these megapixels add up massive amounts of data that needs to be stored. Although HDDs will continue to increase in capacity, demand for HDDs in surveillance systems will drive unit production increasing from 2.4 million drives in 2012 to an estimated 7.3 million drives in 20171. While the current maximum capacity of surveillance optimized HDDs is 4 Terabytes, the market is hungry for even larger capacity HDDs. A reason for the larger capacity points is the need to reduce the spindle count in the surveillance system while delivering greater data storage capacity. IHS estimates that 413 Petabytes2 of surveillance video data is generated in just one day by all the new surveillance cameras installed worldwide in 2013. This is four times the amount of photo and video data stored on Facebook as of February 20122.

As for the people who say spinning rust is dead and SSDs will replace HDDs as the primary storage device in all applications, all I can say is, that is wishful thinking. While SSDs have their place, capacity and costs limit its deployment to specific applications, and when it comes, to surveillance data storage, SSDs are not suited because of the aforementioned reasons. Putting aside the cost sensitive nature of the surveillance market, SSD's performance is not required for this market. Existing HDD technology and HDD deployment models(ie: RAID) deliver sufficient performance that address the needs of the market. Our engineers are working with market leaders to develop the storage necessary for the next generation of surveillance systems. The surveillance market will grow. The reason for such my definitive statement is that this data can and will be used for a variety of applications, ranging from safety to studying consumer purchasing habits, behavior recognition and pattern recognition to help improve traffic. These applications are all drivers for greater data storage as cameras pump more 1's and 0's into DVRs, NVRs and other networked storage systems. Next time you go anywhere do a double check of yourself in the mirror to make sure you look your best for the camera.

1IHS press release 6/18/13: Market for Hard Drives in Video Surveillance to Hit Billion-Dollar Mark by 2017
2IHS press release 10/10/13: Big, Big, Big Data: The Rise of HD Video Surveillance Cameras Spurs Information Explosion

The views expressed on this post are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of TAEC or Toshiba Corporation.


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