The massive floods in Thailand recently have caused severe hard disk drive (HDD) shortages now around the globe, as Thailand is the world's second-largest exporter of HDDs after China. The potential widespread impact of HDDs running out of stock is expected to cause a rocket in prices that may last till Q1 2012.

The pursuit of higher video quality and resolution requires much larger storage space for surveillance users nowadays. To further save storage space and budget, Huperlab has unveiled some tips for better utilising HDD storage space that is based on the usage of their Hupervision intelligent surveillance system by adjusting options for recording setting, video compression formats and compression ratios.

The Hupervision intelligent surveillance system offers four recording methods to select, such as non-stop recording, event recording, non-stop smart recording and time-lapse recording to meet the demands of different period of recording time and mode. The non-stop smart recording can activate full recording speed once an event is detected for practical usage scenarios.

Given the video compression, the system supports three video compression formats, as H.264, HM (MPEG4-like format) and motion JPEG, but each further provides several levels of video quality such as fast, compact, good quality, better quality and best quality for versatile requirements in application.

In combination with intelligent settings, it is suggested to adjust the recording settings, as the Hupervision H.264 compact quality along with non-stop smart recording will keep video files to a smaller size and yet retain moderate video quality.