Digital Evidence Storage

Evidence storage separates into at least two tiers and often three, and conflating them is the most common and most expensive mistake. The primary tier holds recent recordings that are actively reviewed, tagged, redacted and released — it needs performance, and it is the smallest tier by capacity. The retention tier holds everything inside the statutory window that nobody is currently looking at, which is the overwhelming majority of the data and where capacity planning actually happens. Below both sits an archive tier for the small subset flagged for long or indefinite retention, where cost per terabyte matters far more than latency.

Immutability has moved from a nice-to-have to a design requirement in most agencies, and for a straightforward reason: a retention obligation is only meaningful if the data cannot be altered or deleted inside the window, whether by accident, by a malicious insider or by ransomware. Write-once storage and hardened backup targets exist specifically for that, and they are a distinct product category from ordinary backup capacity.

The third variable is refresh. Storage arrays age out on a hardware cycle that is shorter than most evidence retention schedules, which means at least one migration inside the life of the data. Planning that migration at purchase time — capacity headroom, a compatible successor generation, a realistic migration window — is far cheaper than discovering it when the support contract lapses.

We supply storage. We do not handle evidence, do not participate in chain of custody, do not operate an evidence-management platform and do not perform redaction or release. Those are law-enforcement functions with legal consequences attached, and a hardware supplier has no business inside them. Any capability description that blurred that line would be a liability to your agency, not a service to it.

The evidence-management platform itself — the system that ingests from the cameras, applies retention categories, tracks access and produces the audit trail — is a separate procurement and does not carry priced rows in our catalog. Where you have already selected one, we size and supply the storage it sits on and quote against its documented requirements. Where you have not, that selection should come first, because it constrains the storage design.

Retention schedules are set by statute, court rule and agency policy, and they differ substantially by state and by category of recording. We size against the schedule you give us and will tell you what a change to that schedule costs in capacity — but the schedule itself is not ours to determine.