Hi,

How long can I expect my HD to last when I use it in my DVR system? I was by a vendor that it may last only 1-2 years on a 24x7 basis. Is this true?

Depends on the kind of hard drive. Most enterprise level hard drives are the ones that are mainly used. If you buy one off of retail shelves it might not last as long.

Life can also depend on the location, any drive subjected to any vibration wont last as long, so keep it on something that wont wobble

Also, temperature, if its in a hot room, or the cooling in the DVR is insufficient then life will be reduced.

Quality of power (and the power supply/regulators in the DVR) is another thing that can affect the life, surges/spikes etc can reduce life or kill it completely. So clean, well regulated power helps.

My 4ch DVR ("All about image recognition and Processing" branded) is on it's 2nd HD, had it 5 years. The 9ch (CPCam CPD576W) is still on it's 2nd HD after 3 years, but only because I upgraded for more capacity. My 16ch (CPCam 507HC) is on it's original HD but that's only about a year old.

The DVR in my car (Aver EB1304MOB puked it's first HD after about a year and I installed a 250GB laptop hard drive in it's place, that's been in there about 3mo now)

My biggest problem with HD longevity in DVRs is that the early signs of problems tended to have been visible in the recorded video, so diligence is required to ensure it is all working normally. I have a weekly maintenance routine that takes about 10 mins and includes checking the logs for signs of vloss or HD problems, and playing back segments of video from each DVR.


If you want a solid HD that will run for years at 24x7 then get one from a supplier of commercial datacenter equipment. If you buy a hard drive from Dell's business server operation then it's designed to run 24x7, although you may IDE tough to get hold of these days as servers tednt o run SATA or SAS HDs. Consumer HDs may not be designed to run all the time.

I personally run consumer HDs because they are cheaper and are throwaways - as long as you spot faults immediately.

Do Flash based SATA HD last longer? SInce there are no mech parts, it should be more stable?

Actually they have a shorter life. NAND Flash memory has limitted write cycles. There are algorithms to spread the load to every cell (load levelling) but even with that, life expectancy in this application is going to be short.

More expensive SLC Flash (as opposed to MLC) tends to have longer life but it also costs a lot more.

If you are using regular regular off the shelf drives, they will not last. Both Seagate and Western Digital are producing what they call it "Surveillance Grade" drives, which are little more expensive, but do last much longer. They are designed to work 24/7 and perform very well.

In case of Seagate, they are offering five years warranty on their drives for now. There was an announcement recently that they are thinking to drop this warranty to three years...

Moth manufacturers make great drives and as long as you intend to use their products in a DVR, go with the surveillance grade version and you will do well...

Word of caution - regardless how great the drives are, they get damaged and the main cause is heat... therefore, make sure that your DVR is well ventilated by adding or replacing system fans... In most cases, DVRs do not come complete with all the necessary fans, so find out if your case can take or can add additional fan... and also replace the fans at least once per year... life expectancy of most fans are a year, so replacing them will prolong your system's life...

Second that - heat is the biggest enemy of ALL components in a computer. Proper cooling is essential - not just the fans, but the placement of the system. Always make sure there's good unobstructed airflow around it, and keep the dust to a minimum. Better cases will have filters on the air intakes, to prevent dust getting into the machine.

Also, when it comes to PCs, don't leave blank plates out, either the ones on drive bays or the ones for the slot cutouts in the back. And don't run with the case open - it actually isn't cooler that way. Proper airflow, with sufficient fans, needs to move air through the case steadily, blowing out the hot air so cool air is drawn in.

There's a great article on case airflow strategies here: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1 ... 927,00.asp

All wonderful advise. I'll add this as well. Every 4-6 months, pop the lid off and blow out the dust. This helps a whole lot to keep everything working well. Don't install in areas where people smoke, ever. I've seen drives take a dive over and over again only to find out it's on the desk in a convience store and the manager sits there in this 8'x8' room smoking all day. Clean and cool are the keys to success with any type of computer hardware.

Friend of mine serviced a DVR in the back office area of a restaurant... he found the grease in the air (from the kitchen) had collected on the heat sink fins, and that collected all the dust in the air into a thick fuzz that he couldn't clean off no matter what he tried.

Few more ideas...

Do not use any filters on the front of the unit (some cases come with disposable or washable filters). These filters actually harm the systems more than they help. They accumulate dust and dirt in a short period of time and then slow down the air flow.. thus increases the heat within the system.

Besides adding or changing fans within the systems, I strongly recommend DVR lockbox with built in fans... Several advantages going with them... one of which is to secure the DVR and the second, increase the air flow... These lockboxes are not that expensive, however worth the investment...

That's the truth.

I can always tell which computers have been living in a smoking household... they're horrific inside.

The problem is hard drives originally were never designed to run 24 7. If you think about it on most corporate networks, the hard drive only cycles when it is either saving data or writing or seeking. With DVRs they are running all the time. To answer the call most of the manufacturers designed hard drives for the DVR market and those drives have an MTBF of almost 100 years and carry a warranty of 5 years.

These drives though do not perform as well when operating in a RAID environment and for those applications there are drives designed to perform for those specific applications.

100 years? I only wish we could get even 5 years out of ours. At this point, we have replaced nearly 10% of our drives and they were new in late 2006. MTBF figures are, if not outright lies, at least fairy tales.

Here is an excellent article on hard disk failure rates and MTTF/MTBF:
http://db.usenix.org/events/fast07/tech/schroeder/schroeder_html/index.html

Here's another by David Morgenstern at eWeek.com:
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Data-Storage/Hard-Disk-MTBF-Wheres-the-Reliable-Reliability-Data/
"As I mentioned in a recent column on mean time between failure, a couple of papers presented at FAST 07 (the USENIX conference on File and Storage Technologies) showed that annual disk replacement rates are much higher than predicted, the well-held belief in a burn-in phase for hard disk life cycle was wrong, and the SMART (self-monitoring, analysis and reporting technology) code in hard drives and storage management software—long touted by the industry as the best predictor of disk failure—was mostly a security blanket for IT managers. "

It is what it is the technology is long gone way before that. I know we use 10,000's of drives every year and we have had the best luck with Western Digital (1% failure rate at most).

We have also found over the years that some drives from a manufacturer would do better than others. For example with 750GB hard drives never had a problem and a few years ago the 320's had some issues. I guess when you use as many drives as we do you see a lot more of the reliability as opposed to a fluke.

What you read though is correct about environmental conditions. Cool climate that is dust free is best but obviously not always possible. That is why typically when the DVR is going to be in an uncontrolled environment unless the DVR is in an enclosure go with an embedded system, which is a little more forgiving systemwide.