6TB Hard Drive For Surveillance? New Seagate Release

This is where video surveillance breaks away from the typical IT market. RAID 5/RAID 6 is rarely used for enterprise storage. The new defacto standard is "OBR10" (One Big RAID 10). This is because hard drives are HUGE for most of the things people use them for - a few TB should be enough to store every version of every document a typical small business will make for the lifetime of their storage appliance. Any enterprise that needs something like a 3PAR SAN is big enough that dropping 6 figures on it is less of an issue than insane rebuild times.

Unfotunately, we're not there yet for video surveillance. Once 10TB or larger drives are available and reasonable, I think we'll cross that threshold of "Just put it in a RAID 10."

This will likely lead to other changes in the industry. Why even bother with H.265 when you can stuff 120TB+ in a 2U enclosure for <$10K? 30 days? Let's keep everything forever. Why not? This is also going to coencide with the shift from 10/100/1000 to 100/1000/10000 for most network interfaces.

I dare say that bandwidth and storage is going to stop being a limitation for video on the LAN in the next 10 years. Resolution won't see nearly the same level of increase, as lens technology hasn't been advancing at the same pace. We can already do 60+FPS, but I rarely see a need for >8, so that won't likely be an issue any time soon either.

I say bring on OBR10, bring on GbE NICs being "You still use those?" and bring on HDDs so big, we don't know what to do with them.