"Video surveillance applications require 24/7 recording and high reliability, as the data recorded is evidence. However, conventional RAID arrays maximise the disk stress and duty cycle (high temperature, high vibration and 100% duty cycle) typically resulting a 3-year disk replacement cycle, ignoring RAID disk failures occur anyway. Veracity's COLDSTORE system was conceived, designed and developed to solve exactly this problem. Recording sequentially allows all non-recording disks in the array to be switched off, thus dramatically reducing duty cycle, wear levels and exposure to vibration, even though the array is recording video 24/7 at very high data rates. This approach doubles or even triples standard hard disk lifetimes to seven or eight years or more, with plenty of real-world example projects where original COLDSTOREs and disk are still in use 10 years later ! Constant low power and long disk life means the TCO of a COLDSTORE system is far lower than an equivalent RAID system."