Seagate launches SkyHawk AI 18TB Hard Drive

FREMONT, Calif.—Seagate Technology, a leader in data storage and management solutions, announced it is shipping 18TB SkyHawk Artificial Intelligence drives in volume.

“Seagate’s SkyHawk AI 18TB video security system hard drive was designed for growing data demands to accommodate nodes of any size making it easy to scale from terabytes to petabytes,” said Jeff Fochtman, senior vice president, marketing and business at Seagate Technology. “With the SkyHawk AI 18TB, Seagate has seen improvements in operational and analytical processes, providing faster access to video security footage when compared earlier versions.”

SkyHawk AI is the “world’s first purpose-built hard drive for artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled Surveillance solutions, enabling quicker and smarter decisions, the company said. The new drive supports deep learning and machine learning workload streams for Edge applications with ImagePerfectAI.

The capacity to retain more data over time is required for deep learning systems to become smarter and more accurate in their predictive analysis, and behavior analysis requires significantly more data than traditional video capture. SkyHawk AI simultaneously sustains 32 AI streams alongside 64 video streams and supports multi-bay NVR and AI-enabled NVR.

SkyHawk AI offers a 550TB/year workload rate, more than 3× the workload rate of standard surveillance hard drives in order to manage data deluge in complex video security system environments without sacrificing performance. This drive intelligently adapts between traditional video workloads and video+AI workloads.

Built to meet the demands of an always-on large workload in an AI enabled NVR system, SkyHawk AI 18TB accommodates recording and analyzing footage simultaneously from multiple cameras which equips customers with faster and smarter footage analysis by eliminating data latency and processing. It includes three years of Seagate Rescue Services for additional peace of mind in the event of data loss or accident and a standard 3-year limited warranty.