Seagate Launches First Drive for AI-Enabled Surveillance

Seagate Technology plc announced its SkyHawk™ AI hard disk drive (HDD), the first drive created specifically for artificial intelligence (AI) enabled video surveillance solutions. Building on Seagate’s 10-year track record of delivering surveillance optimized storage performance, SkyHawk AI provides bandwidth and processing power to manage always-on, data-intensive workloads, while simultaneously analyzing and recording footage from multiple HD cameras.

SkyHawk AI is ideal for intensive computational workloads that typically accompany AI work streams, as its high throughput and enhanced caching deliver low latency and random read performance to locate and deliver video images and footage analysis. This enables decision making, eliminating the latency of exchanging cloud-based data and processing. Equipped with Seagate ImagePerfect™ AI firmware, the drive reliably records video footage with no dropped frames, while simultaneously facilitating AI-enabled NVR analytics – ensuring that intelligence gathered through video surveillance footage is not lost.

“The use of AI technology in surveillance is steadily increasing – both in the edge and backend installations such as retail fronts and large city traffic management. Seagate has led the surveillance storage market since its early days, a decade ago, by delivering industry leading HDD products that have enabled more than 5X increase in exabytes during this time period,” said Sai Varanasi, vice president product line management at Seagate Technology. “We are excited to introduce smart, purpose-built SkyHawk AI solutions that expand the design space for our customers and partners, allowing them to implement next-generation deep learning and video analytics applications.”