Anyone tried these SSD surveillance disks?

[ipOsX]

SSD for Video Surveillance

I read here that SSDs are not well-suited to the read/write demands of 24/7 CCTV but I assume that Hikvision have tested them and found them fit for purpose.

I realise that they are expensive and may not last as long as conventional disks but my priorities would for a quieter-running disk and one which could smoothly handle high frame rate recording and playback of up to 4k video. As a desktop video editor, I know that most conventional hard drives can't handle that - which is why I have a 4TB SSD in my PC.

 

[Greg Castiglione]

I too have wondered if a SSD would be a good choice to upgrade a NVR. When I bought my 16 channel Lorex NVR, it came with a 3tb drive. Before I implemented the NVR, I replaced the drive with a 6tb drive of the same specification. It took me all of 10 minutes. At the time (4 months ago) a 6TB SSD drive wasn't available or was just too expensive. I replaced the drive with a sata mechanical drive. I bet within 2 years, 6TB SSD drives would become more commonplace for nvr usage. I can't help but think that SSD drives are the way to go for NVRs. Faster and more reliable!! -Greg--

 

[tigerwillow1]

Now that big SSDs are creeping into the realm of affordability, maybe they will be suitable for video storage. I believe the concern has been the limited number of write cycles inherent in SSD technology. In my system with the camera count and frame rate I run, the 2 TB disk holds about 3 days worth of video. Every memory cell getting a few write hits every 3 days is nothing compared to the way windows and the browsers mercilessly pound on the disks. The key, I think, is how the high-use directory and allocation table areas hold up in the SSD. I don't know the low-level details of NTFS or EXT4 to throw out an informed opinion, but definitely worth thinking about, IMO. I got my first SSD 8 years ago and have accumulated about a dozen since then, with no failures that I'm aware of. I'm a brand snob, using only Intel and Samsung.

 

[IAmATeaf]

Do NVRs or BI even need the speeds that SSDs offer? Given their write cycle limitation which must get accelerated if used within a CCTV environment I personally won’t be using SSDs.

 

[biggen]

The 960TB model has a rating of 800TBW (Terabyes written). That means it should hold up to that load but perhaps not after. So depends on your need. How much do you write in a year?

I write about 150TB/year on one of my setups so it would last quite a while. But the problem is they are much more expensive per GB vs mechanicals drive. Plus, capacity is a problem. I buy Exos X drives that have capacities up to 16TB. I’d have to buy a ton of those SSDs and put them into a RAID array to match the same amount of raw storage I get with just one Exos X 16.

Unless you are limited to rack servers that only have 2.5” drive carriers, I don’t see a whole lot of upside using SSDs for surveillance storage. We need raw storage not fast access times. I also wouldn’t buy drives from them. If you want SSDs, buy enterprise level SSDs from Intel, Micron, Samsung, etc...

 

[imnozi]

Waking this year-old thread. Raw storage is important. But if you ever have to wade through 16 cameras over 20 days looking for certain classes of incident (employee with sticky fingers, for example), you will want fast access times for two reasons: (1) to find the incidents and (2) to export them to a laptop. Of course, if your time is free or unlimited or you charge your client by the hour, it doesn't matter how long it takes to review all the video. And if the video will never be needed, access time is also immaterial.

 

[SyconsciousAu]

you will want fast access times for two reasons: (1) to find the incidents and (2) to export them to a laptop.

An SSD may help in this regard, if the real cause of the delay is in fact the drive. The reality is that the drive is rarely the cause of the bottleneck in a CCTV System. My Blue Iris box has an SSD for the Operating System and "New" Folder but long term recording goes to a good old fashioned mechanical hard drive. There is no discernible difference between playing back clips from either drive. Archiving the files to an external drive is the same story. No discernible difference.

The reason for that is that it is an I7-8700 with 16GB of ram on board. It has plenty of processor power and memory so it can keep recording whilst it plays back or transcodes video for export. Consumer grade and even cheaper commercial grade NVR's have little embedded processors with limited memory that are oftenflat out just recording the incoming video stream from the cameras. When you ask them to do anything else they will do it, in between the processor operations that record video, and they will always prioritise the recording of video over any other operation. If you want to see what I mean give one a task like exporting a file and then have someone walk test the cameras. You can watch the time remaining for your export operation go up as they do because the processor must deal with recording the video streams. Or alternatively try the same export during the day and during the night. Because the bitrate of the streams goes up at night the processor works harder and has less power to allocate to your export task so it takes longer.

There are some really good reasons you might want to use an SSD in a CCTV scenario, however, if what you want is faster search, playback, and export times, you are more likely than not barking up the wrong tree.

 

[RedSn0w]

I'm trying to go down a similar route, I use Blue Iris on an i9 11900k with 64GB of DDR4 RAM and an 8TB WD Purple HDD. What I'm thinking of doing is, adding a 1TB Samsung SSD (preferably MLC) and allocating 350GB of it to Blue Iris storage. Then once the 350GB is used up BI will automatically move it over to the HDD, this allows for quick searching and viewing of recent footage which is what I want, does this sound like a good idea? I'm only allocating 350GB with the hope that the SSD controller automatically shares the writing load across the entire NAND flash over time to increase the life span, which I'm pretty sure is what they do.

 

[cctv-dave]

I have a NAS which can do a 130megabtyes reading per second and it's a cheap one.
What's the speed that BI can analyse video at ? Or indeed you ?
Buy another 8TB purple drive and mirror it. Then not only do you have double data rate but you've got a backup too.

 

[RedSn0w]

I have a NAS which can do a 130megabtyes reading per second and it's a cheap one.
What's the speed that BI can analyse video at ? Or indeed you ?
Buy another 8TB purple drive and mirror it. Then not only do you have double data rate but you've got a backup too.

If you have multiplexing enabled on your RAID controller in RAID 1 then yes you can have faster read speeds and redundancy too. I guess that would be a better idea, thanks!

 

[Flintstone61]

mirror or stripe?
Or is a multiplexed Mirror a performance enhancement over just a plain old Mirror? I'm thinkin it will read video for playback off both drives?

 

[RedSn0w]

mirror or stripe?
Or is a multiplexed Mirror a performance enhancement over just a plain old Mirror? I'm thinkin it will read video for playback off both drives?

Correct, it's just an enhanced mirror that allows the controller to read from both drives, however, it does not allow for faster writing speeds unless you're using RAID 0 stripping.

 

[Flintstone61]

cool. thx

 

[cctv-dave]

People in the CCTV world are still asking for RAID5. Technology has passed it by and it's now just a bad idea really.
Drives are really cheap. And if you got for the really cheap ones for a RAID they are even cheaper

I can count on one hand the number of places that have asked for RAID then actually replace the drives when the warranty runs out.
Instead they wait for them to fail, but ever fewer people actually check their RAID systems to see if the footage isn't suffering bitrot or RAID is failing.

Selling RAID in CCTV is like selling underbody coating on new cars for the most part.

 

[bp2008]

On the subject of SSDs, it is possible to buy used datacenter SSDs on ebay which usually have a lot more write endurance than consumer SSDs. I did this a while ago for my continuous recording box, estimating that even at the high write load it should last 5+ years. But sadly that SSD died after less than a year. The NAND (actual data storage) was most likely still fine. I think it was the controller that went bad because just having the disk in the system prevented the system from booting up.