Hard Drive Priorities

area651 said:

That's awesome that you have family to cross NAS backup with! I looked into the various cloud storage options (backblaze, AWS, etc...) and the cheapest I could find for a 8tb backup was $520 a year! For that price, I'm better off just buying another nas and convincing some friend to just let it live on their network.

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You can mirror your NAS data to a PC then use backblaze for 60 bux a year unlimited. You are only out the cost of a drive.
I use crashplan for file backup, unlike backblaze, which removes deleted files after 30 days, it has an option to never remove deleted files. So if a user accidentally deletes an important file and you notice on day 31, you are not screwed.

ctgoldwing said:

If you are really serious about data protection then you have to be really serious about data back up. The overall 'least expensive' route may be a cloud backup solution. Remember if you aren't backing up off premises, you aren't backing up.
In my case I have TB's of photographs going back 20 years plus the assorted ephemeral one accumulates over decades. Now, add to that my video backups. I chose to go the NAS route. In addition 2 of my sons & I back up to each other's NAS' each night. Being paranoid about backups my NAS can withstand two simultaneous drive failures and I have an installed hot spare. All you need is to have a lightning hit like I did last year and you get religion real fast.

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I cannot agree more with what you are saying. I am also doing data synchronisation off-site, but from my own experience: just like with RAID, do NOT rely solely on synchronisation, especially like you wrote: "every night". For data retrieval due to accidential data removal, you can indeed fetch your files from the off-site "replica". However, if a cryptolocker lands on your primary site, it will sneak silently through your nightly synchronisation into your remote off-site backups. And when you do not have (regular/automated?) checks off these off-site versions (eg scheduled md5/sha-hash), you will never be able to get your files back. I always advice the 3-2-1 backup strategy: keep (at least) 3 versions of a file, (at least) in 2 locations and (at least) 1 OFFLINE version (eg tape/removable drive). I've seen enough NAS'es being encrypted long before the end-user even noticed it. Even when they thought that a "user/pass" combo on the NAS share would save their precious files. So you are right: modern technology enables lots of creative "solutions", but you have to be aware of the limitations.

But this discussion is going too much off-topic for an NVR hard-drive selection question. For a NAS: it is indispensable, for an NVR, I'm not sure.

Happy Camming!
CC

To update this thread, I have a new HDD (shown in the pic above) installed, 7200rpm and 256MB cache. Playback at the NVR seems a little faster but playback remotely hasn't changed. I picked up a CAT7 cable to replace the CAT5e cable that connects the NVR to the wifi router. I haven't done a permanent install, but just ran it across the floor between the NVR and router, and didn't make any difference.

Not sure what else to check. I've poked around the router settings, looking for a way to speed up the data transmission, but didn't find anything that looked like it would help.

alastairstevenson said:

Worth googling about SMR and CMR just now, especially with respect to RAID and WD.
A bit of a scandal going on.

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That was only with their cheapest tier NAS drives (WD Red). Their purple drives are all CMR.

It's also worth noting that Toshiba and Seagate were doing the same thing, they just weren't as sneaky about it.

Mainsail said:

To update this thread, I have a new HDD (shown in the pic above) installed, 7200rpm and 256MB cache. Playback at the NVR seems a little faster but playback remotely hasn't changed. I picked up a CAT7 cable to replace the CAT5e cable that connects the NVR to the wifi router. I haven't done a permanent install, but just ran it across the floor between the NVR and router, and didn't make any difference.

Not sure what else to check. I've poked around the router settings, looking for a way to speed up the data transmission, but didn't find anything that looked like it would help.

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Probably just the NVR itself, so not much you can do about it. Perhaps check for firmware updates, but beyond that you're stuck with it.

If there is a setting to turn down the streaming quality, that might help.

I can tell you that my Dahua NVR shows it will accept up to a 6T drive, and I had a 12T WD purple drive sitting here
when the old drive died, so I installed the 12T drive. It shows 12T and has worked well for over 6 months now.

dunno how true this is but I see this reported. Western Digital Comes Clean, Shares Which Hard Drives Use SMR - ExtremeTech