Know Your CCTV Storage Devices

As the CCTV camera becomes better and shoots videos in higher resolutions, the storage requirement also increases drastically. New-gen IP cameras generate richer videos and need far more storage than their analog predecessors did. Here is what you need to know about your CCTV storage solutions that you may not know.

1.       Write cycles
Video surveillance workloads are different from traditional IT workloads.  Why? Because while a standard computer hard disk drive (HDD) is designed to read, write, and transfer data, a surveillance drive is designed to focus mainly on writing data to the drive. Users in the security industry tend to check the recorded video, based on certain incidents happening more infrequently. Therefore, general desktop HDDs are typically not tested for the high write workloads of surveillance HDDs, which are optimized to prioritize writing. One example is the Western Digital WD Purple® portfolio, which is built from the ground up for video surveillance.

2.      Quality and Quantity of Data
A network video recorder (NVR) encodes and processes data on the camera before transmitting it to the recorder for storage and remote viewing. It connects to an IP camera system over an Ethernet or a Wi-Fi connection. When image quality and clarity are a priority, investing in an NVR that supports a higher resolution of video is critical. Additionally, HDD capacity also plays a key role in defining the quantity and quality of data that an NVR can store. It is important to use high-performance and high-capacity drives such as the Western Digital WD Purple Pro Surveillance Hard Drive that comes in up to 22TB[1] capacities.

3.      Local Storage
As the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications and 4K video rise in adoption, they are driving the demand for storage to hold increasing amounts of data on the camera. Edge storage offers high-performance and can provide real-time analysis of data and becomes critical for backing up a connection to the cloud or if there is a sudden drop in network availability. As surveillance or CCTV cameras typically enable long, continuous recordings, the storage used must be built for high reliability and performance. The storage should be a cost-effective combination of ultra-endurance, high performance, and high capacity such as Western Digital’s WD Purple SC QD101 Ultra Endurance microSD™ Card that comes in up to 1TB of storage capacity and is built especially for video surveillance.

4.       Multiple Video Storage Levels
The video surveillance storage chosen depends on the use case and the camera types and the number of cameras installed. Today’s security cameras often record video continuously in 1080p, but 4K-compliant cameras are projected to make up over 24% of all network cameras shipped by 20232.  So, the CCTV or surveillance camera will generate even more data in the near future. This drives the need for cost-effective storage systems to manage the ever-growing data. Multiple storage tiers can help cost-effectively manage data on different storage devices, depending on the use cases and the storage costs and benefits evaluation.

5.       Cloud-Based Storage
For deeper insights and to reveal patterns from a massive amount of data it should be moved to the cloud. AI and DL need thousands of hours of training video, and petabytes of data. These workloads depend on the high-capacity capabilities of enterprise-class hard drives (HDDs) – such as 22TB drives from Western Digital and high-performance enterprise SSD flash devices, platforms, or arrays.  Western Digital offers enterprise-class NVMe™ SSDs; these performance NVMe SSDs target cloud compute and enterprise workloads that require low latency and high availability of data.

Authored by:

Khalid Wani, Senior Director - Sales, India, Western Digital