Seagate Announces 20TB Variant of SkyHawk AI Hard Drive

[btarunr]

AI-enabled video imaging and analytics systems require support for heavy workloads that process and analyze multiple streams and thousands of hours of video data. Today during the ISC West trade show in Las Vegas, Nev., Seagate Technology Holdings plc, a world leader in mass-data storage infrastructure solutions, launched the new SkyHawk AI 20 TB hard disk drive (HDD). The mass-capacity HDD adds to the company's leading line of video imaging and analytics (VIA) devices.

Purposely designed for network video recorders (NVRs) enabled with AI for edge security applications, Seagate's SkyHawk AI 20 TB HDD intelligently adapts to the scale of the users' AI environment, supporting up to 64 HD video streams and 32 AI streams. With this capability to support scalable AI workloads, SkyHawk AI meets the growing needs of advanced VIA systems to analyze and record video footage while simultaneously supporting GPU analytics.



Built with ImagePerfect AI firmware, the drive delivers zero dropped frames while supporting heavier workloads. An enterprise-class drive, the new SkyHawk AI 20 TB features high reliability with two million hours mean time between failures (MTBF) and a 550 TB/year workload rate, supporting over three times the workload of standard VIA drives.

The drive comes equipped with SkyHawk Health Management to actively protect users' VIA storage by monitoring environmental and usage conditions and recommending preventative actions if necessary. With three years of Rescue Data Recovery Services, SkyHawk AI gives users the power to recover data from unexpected loss due to power outages, user error, and more.

Qualified and tested by Seagate's VIA partners earlier this year, SkyHawk AI 20 TB is mass shipping this month and available for $529.99. The drive will be on display at ISC West in Las Vegas on March 23-25 where visitors to Seagate's booth (#10047) can learn more about SkyHawk's proven reliability with top-leading NVR surveillance partners. Additionally, Seagate will showcase its full storage portfolio of video imaging and analytics solutions, including how Seagate's Lyve solutions and enterprise data systems unlock valuable insights from edge to cloud.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[InVasMani]

What if storage had GPU tech in that could do inference upscale on images from photo's to game textures to upscale and improve their quality over time when accessed. I wonder AMD/NVIDIA and storage brands like WD/Seagate/ect have ever considered such a approach with a chip built in for it. I think it could work well for a HDD, but NAND it's more complicated more limited storage and limited writes however both are becoming less concerning over time. I don't how the algorithm might work in regard to training, but image if they could perfect it in a pretty convincing way taking a old dated game and basically over time re-mastering the game assets of it through AI inference built into the storage. Time to replay unreal tournament everything old is new again!

 

[windwhirl]

What if storage had GPU tech in that could do inference upscale on images from photo's to game textures to upscale and improve their quality over time when accessed.

This is used for vigilance. Any manipulation of the video stream could render it invalid as proof.

 

[InVasMani]

This is used for vigilance. Any manipulation of the video stream could render it invalid as proof.

That's completely valid within the context of this product, but what I was getting at was more the general context AI enhanced storage which this kind of fringes on a bit. I was considering where it could lead. I agree from the context of surveillance you wouldn't want to invalidate the stream absolutely and is a good point in regards to AI and this product itself. I was more just trying to foster conversation about AI enhanced storage. I see avenues for growth with it. I mean beyond the upscale and inference of images there is compression as well the storage could have chip that offload compression on the storage device itself. It would actually be pretty great if it did and worked reasonably even if it was initially just certain compression techniques that are more trivial today.

Storage has always kind of til recently been just not AI opens up room for storage to still be just that, but also capable of improving the storage being kept through interference and compressing it while offloading the compression by the device itself. It's slightly off topic to the product intention itself I suppose admittedly, but in line with the AI aspect of it which is a relatively new thing and worthy of discussing the potential around it. I just thought it was worth mentioning the prospects of where AI storage might progress. It makes me think the right company buying a stake into a storage company could lead to some big innovation around it. It's also applicable to system memory and GPU video memory to some extent as well though more limited on capacity. Thinking about it even further from the compression side a dedicated co-processor card for disk compression would be a neat device.

 

[TheUn4seen]

I love how the marketing team managed to put "AI" almost a dozen times in this snippet. From what I can gather it does some manipulation to avoid dropping frames in surveillance video streams, but it would make it a fairly useless device as far as an evidence gathering tool, any kind of manipulation makes evidence inadmissible in most countries. Maybe they're just doing some funky caching and their legal team probably made sure it's legal enough, but I wonder if it wouldn't be, in the long run, cheaper to go with a faster solid state array. Much more expensive up front but a company might save a lot on legal costs if a perpetrator decides to go with the "inadmissible evidence due to image manipulation" defense.