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Which Hard Drive do you use?

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Looking to upgrade my CCTV PC and curious what others are running for hard drives.

 

It is currently running a E7300 cpu, 8gb, 300gb boot drive, 1tb WD1001FALS 7200rpm 32mb data drive. DVR4000, with 8 cameras at D1 recording resolution. Though it records fine, the computer is pretty much taxed.

 

Will be moving up to a I3-2100T, 8gbDDR3, 64gb SSD boot, and looking seriously at a Samsung HD103SJ drive in Raid0 which seems to score very well in reviews with a pretty decent power draw. This PC is on all of the time and also runs auction snipes, Activehome (X10), etc.

 

 

Kind of curious what others are running at D1 resolution and results.

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Just curious, what CCTV hardware/software are you using on this system? I don't think a SSD is really useful in this application. You don't need HD access speed. A basic 7200 RPM drive would be fine. And Raid 0 is also not needed for most situation... unless you are trying to capture a 128 cameras on this. Perhaps some more details....

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SSD boot=for OS, quicker and snappier all around, use it for all my new PC builds. My current 7200 drive just lags recording D1 on 8 cameras thus thus a faster drive and Raid0. DVR4000. It does great with 320x200 recordings but those do nothing for me.

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The "quicker snappier" drive is not really needed for CCTV analog applications, as your program is really taking little hard drive usage to operate. But if you are running a bunch of other stuff on your computer that you access everyday, than I guess a SSD might be fine. BUt if you are having problems accessing standard D1 video from a 7200 RPM drive, than something else is wrong. I have multiple systems running on 7200 drives, and it is pretty snappy getting around.

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Not all 7200rpm drives are the same. And as I am RECORDING D1 on 8 cameras (not accessing them), this is where the lag is with the current system. Plus, the power draw on my current system is too high for my taste vs what the new Sandy Bridge cores run at.

SSDs go into every computer of mine now. It does make that much of a difference, especially when they are in Raid0. You may feel otherwise, but once you go SSD, there is not turning back. Is it required? That is subjective at best as most things on the planet are not required.

 

Thanks for your response, I was looking for a bit more information on hard drives and what others are running.

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I'd be scared running drives in RAID 0 - what if one fails!! If your HD can't record 8 cameras at once, then something is wrong with it.

 

I have a single Seagate 1TB, 7200 RPM SATA HD for recording 4 D1 cameras. Its writing about 10% of the time. Recording is done on an oldish P4 with ~400MB of DDR RAM!

 

I would feel a lot more comfortable with 2 drives in RAID 1, or even better 4 drives in RAID 10!

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We're using Western Digital "Black" series drives now and have found them really solid. They cost a bit more, but they've given us few, if any problems, whether in a DVR, or in a RAID.

 

One customer now, we're using 8-bay RAID arrays with WD Blacks in RAID6, and using those as the primary data drives for the DVRs, connected via iSCSI. Whatever internal drive comes with the DVR is configured as an "alternate" drive, which the system uses if the main storage is offline.

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Its writing about 10% of the time. Recording is done on an oldish P4 with ~400MB of DDR RAM!

 

I would feel a lot more comfortable with 2 drives in RAID 1, or even better 4 drives in RAID 10!

 

If your only recording 10% of the time, what are you doing the other 90??????????????

 

My system is recording all 8 camera simultaneously. Raid0 is for speed, if I lose a drive in the process, no big deal, I will sleep fine if my D1 recordings of my trees and dogs are lost. This is only for my home.

 

After much studying it appears the Samsung HD103Sj drives are the best match for my needs. Thanks for the responses.

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WD Blues or Blacks .. work great.

SSD is fine for the OS but not for recording video.

Its common practice to record D1 30fps each channel for 16 cameras on 7200rpm drives.

Also it should be noted 7200rpm drives are almost twice as fast as they were just a couple years ago (from 55 to 135)

 

Rarely ever see a hard drive fail when the system is on a good AVR.

And this coming from a 3rd world country where I had 6 power cuts between Saturday and Sunday alone, and 1 a day since Monday - along with the subsequent brown outs, the king destroyer of hard drives (next to dropping it on the ground)!

 

PS. Make sure to tweak the DVR's OS otherwise it still wont be fast enough

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=030htVp7KLE

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What I meant is that the cameras are continuously recording, but disk utilization (amount of time it is writing/reading data) is only like 10%. So if the drive can record 100MBPS, its only doing 10MBPS.

 

WD Blacks are great drives, but yes, they do cost more. Its like that extra bit of money adds in much more quality control.

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For my personal system, 5x Seagate 7200.12 1TB in RAID5, on an LSI controller.

 

For the work systems, 12x Seagate es.2 1TB in RAID6, on Areca and LSI controllers. LOTS of boxes.

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