A lot is happening in AI world and surveillance industry is not left behind in implementing it in Video Analytic – to find and flag unusual patterns, to reduce the number of false alarms and for behavioral analysis. Now is the time when we have enough processing power required for machine learning. Dahua has announced that it will use intel movidius to build AI in certain camera models and Hikvision has announced AI cloud - which will combine Edge computing with selective data being sent to Cloud for further computing. This is extremely interesting to see how the AI processing will not happen only in the NVR, but also in the Cameras.
However, one thing that doesn’t change is that Eventually all the data ( and metadata) will still be stored to the hard drives (with SD Caching ). Now for AI Analytics , the storage system ( and the hard drives in turn) would have to provide high speed access to the video footage. Imagine the workload a hard drive would have , when there are multiple channels writing to it , and a couple of streams are being read off the disk for AI purpose. A hard drive would need to be much faster than the current one ( to provide the stream of video to AI analytic without affecting the footage write to the disk) and also have a much higher annual workload compared to current surveillance grade drives.
Enter Seagate AI enabled Skyhawk Drives . The choice of the name – “AI Enabled” is very interesting but it doesn't mean that there is AI built in the drive. There is no machine learning algorithm , or processing power built in the drive itself What it can do however is - Provide a higher throughput to the AI enabled application.
So the AI Enabled Skyhawk drives are - drives with higher throughput, enabling any AI enabled surveillance program to read and write at a higher speed than the current surveillance grade drives. These drives have been launched at a time when a lot is happening in AI in Surveillance.
Currently there are only high capacities with this feature - 8 and 10TB . Apart from a higher throughput, they have 3 times higher annual workload than the regular skyhawk (550TB/Annum compared to 180), which is at par with the Exos ( The re branded Constellation Enterprise drives). Warranty offered is 5 years, again same as the Exos drives.
