Hard Drive recommendations?

[Shockwave199]

My experience has been different with Seagate. I don't trust them, having been burned once, and once was enough for me. For years I've been advised against WD in different situations, including music production. I've always used them and they never fail me. The one time I chose an over priced Seagate it took a shit on me. Seagate, bye bye.

 

[nayr]

thats hardly adequate experience to form a reliable opinion...

In the early days of my career I worked in a warehouse building cheap ass computers for tigerdirect and pc magazine as quickly as possible.. I worked there for many years and it resulted in me personally building tens of thousands of computers and I also processed and repaired all the RMA's.. At the time the Seagate's had a much lower failure rate; WD and Maxtor were about even and Fujitsu was the worst of em all.. since then WD has bought maxtor; seagate has reduced quality to compete with them and that resulted in them reducing there 5yr warranty to 3yr in about 2007ish..

Since that time there has been very little to distinguish reliability between Seagate and WD; Ive replaced at least a dozen drives in my servers in the last year alone; most of them OEM Hatachi disks that came with the server... the majority of the time if a Seagate or WD does not arrive DOA or fail within the first 30 days it will exceed its warranty by a year or two. Ive had every brand fail at the most inconvenient possible time; including SSD's.. If I burned every computer/component manufacturer that Ive had a failure with then there would literally be no companies left for me to buy from.

Its not the HDD's fault if you dont backup your important data and you should not hold your own personal failures to that of the manufacturer.. If the disk is in warranty Seagate has always been the easiest to deal with and always advances me a new drive with a return label within a few days.. if the disk is out of warranty and it failed then it was due for a replacement because despite your experience, given enough time and usage every hdd will fail regardless whom makes it.

I think you greatly underestimate what a complicated and precision device a hard drive is; its not your standard solid state electrical circuits.. its basically a little engine running inside your computer that never gets an oil change or new spark plugs or anything and it operates for years, sometimes decades continuously before it fails.

 

[Shockwave199]

Oh believe me, I live by the rule of three with backups. I realize it was one time. But, one too many for me. I'll be curious to see how these purples do.

 

[nayr]

now that a childhood friend landed a job at WD I may personally become a loyal WD customer if I can go through him for new discount disks every once and a while

keep your eyes out on newegg on black friday; great deals on HDD's and if you can get a 4TB red for half the price of a purple then go for it.. traditionally I set aside some money to upgrade my home file server every year; sometimes better deals will steal that money but over the last 12 years ive hit at least 8 good storage upgrades

 

[Shockwave199]

I wanted 4tb drives in the worst way. I'll keep an eye out.

 

[nayr]

my friend whom is in the storage industry just dropped this bit of wisdom on me I thought you guys might be keen to know:

insider pro-tip, always buy the highest capacity version
the lower capacities are typically the same drive, but they ended up with too many media defects and they had to do internal remapping/short-stroking and drop the capacity it sells at

depends on the drive type, number of platters, and platter density though

if you have like a 2TB single platter drive, all the models <2TB will likely be rejects that couldn't hit 2TB of usable platter area

 

[taylor]

16 independent 100 Mbps PoE network interfaces.

So it has 16 PoE ports? That's why there is a fan so it can cool that. The ARM main board can likely be passively cooled.

The fan is the power supply. Just like a PC power supply there is an exhaust fan in the back. The problem is it's a rack-mountable unit so it's slim and the fan (and PSU) is very small and high RPM. Normally when building a PC I'll spring for a PSU that has a large low RPM fans or variable speed.
I was toying with replacing the PSU with a better/quieter one, but I can't seem to find one in this form factor. Even if I did, I'm not sure it would be any better due to the size constraint. I was even considering the idea of modding it which won't be easy. Instead I'll probably end up switching to a PC and Blue Iris eventually. I'm not sure what I'll ultimately do.

 

[taylor]

my friend whom is in the storage industry just dropped this bit of wisdom on me I thought you guys might be keen to know:

That is true. When I worked at TiVo many years ago I did a lot of hard disk quals and learned a lot about drives. The 40GB and 80GB were the same drive. A one platter drive only one side of the platter didn't pass QC. The 160GB was a 2 platter version of the same drive and again it came in a 120GB model that was 3 good sides of 2 platters.
A lot has changed in hard drives since then, but the point remains the same.
I'm not sure if it really matters. The portions of the drive surfaces you get in any of the models are just fine and I don't know if it is any indication of potential failure.

I learned a few things from those days.
1) How the drive is handles is directly related to how long it'll last. Buy retail box drives with full packaging, never buy bulk were someone has (mis-) handled it. I'll never use a pre-handled or used drive in any mission critical situation. It WILL fail in 2 years.
Treat hard drives like they are eggs. Don't remove it from the box until you're ready to install it and just handle it like (again) it's an egg. Even just setting it down on a hard table can result in damage that you won't see for a year. I'm not kidding, the G-forces from even a gentle table impact is enough to cause damage (it's ridiculous.) Try to set it on a cloth or just be super gentle. I know this sound ridiculous, but I've seen the proof. I handled a lot of drives in those days and the ones that weren't handled gently all came back to me 9 months later as dead. Normally I treat a lot of warnings like people are being overly cautious, but trust me on this one. I'll never criticize anyone for being too gentle with HDD.
Once they are installed in the unit, don't slam it around. It's not as fragile in the case since the unit absorbs most of the shock. Also try to avoid moving it while the drives are powered up and spinning. This is when movement will slam the heads against the platter causing a few microns of scrape off, which eventually that dust causes the damage months later. I've seen the actual test result data.
2) Frequent starts and stops is not good. Letting a drive power down in a PC is fine but set it to a long time like 2 hours so that it only powers down when the PC is left idle for hours on end.
3) The above doesn't apply to laptop hard drives. They're built to handle abuse when not spinning and a lot of power up/downs.

A lot of people have different experiences with the same manufacturers or drive models, and I bet most of those complaints are due to handling.

When it comes to my NVR drive, I'm not terribly concerned with reliability. It's just surveillance footage. As long as it doesn't fail right after something bad happens I can probably live without the footage.

 

[Shockwave199]

I handled a lot of drives in those days and the ones that weren't handled gently all came back to me 9 months later as dead. Normally I treat a lot of warnings like people are being overly cautious, but trust me on this one. I'll never criticize anyone for being too gentle with HDD.

We're all screwed thanks to shipping!

 

[taylor]

We're all screwed thanks to shipping!

Actually no. As stupid as it sounds the RETAIL packaging is shock absorbent enough to handle shipping abuse. That's why I say don't buy from someone that resells bulk.

 

[nayr]

Newegg packages its OEM drives perfectly fine (now days).. besides all but the most extreme "bumps" will harm a powered down/parked drive; all the modern drives can withstand a few hundred G's parked... the laptop hdd's just have a accelerometer chip in them and faster mechanics to park the drive before it hits the ground.. its easier with smaller platters.. I buy almost all OEM drives and they last as long as all the retails.

A normal desktop disk, running; cannot withstand bumps or even vibrations very well as when things get upto full RPM there is alot of moving mass and centrifugal forces that can damage bearings, crash heads, etc.

This is why rack mount shelfs are so popular in the industry; put it on the foundation floor and bolt everything inside and it lasts longer because people walking by; doors slamming; bumps against a desk; knocks with a floor cleaners wont cause an adverse environment for an array of spinning platters containing very important data.. You guys doing warehouse installs should never mount a NVR off a wall because those giant garage doors vibrate the whole warehouse, learned that the hard way.

I once threw an one of my old pentium computers in the trunk of my car and forgot about it for about a year; I was a teen never really used the trunk except for holding big speakers so I forgot about it.. The car got into a wreck, the other guy's insurance paid for me to get the same car just better and when I was moving everything over I found that PC in the trunk and it left a big hole in my subwoofer enclosure from impacting it.. I shrugged it off; threw it into the new car's trunk and there it sat for another 6 months or so until I was helping a friend open up a CyberCafe and he needed a small PC based router.. so I went out to my trunk pulled out this old pentium that had been in a boiling/freezing trunk for almost 2 years and an accident that totaled one car and booted it up and one of my old linux installs came right up; I had to clean the crap out of it (after verifying it still worked) because I lived on a dirt washboard road and my trunk wasent sealed.. Setup a few router rules for it and it spent the next 3 years being his company router until the business failed and when I got it back it was still working great... they sure dont make em like they used to

 

[nayr]

meh; just went ahead and got a 4TB purple because newegg had em on sale this weekend.. Worked out because I needed a better video card to add a 3rd monitor for my security cameras and the HDD combined put me just in range of zero percent financing.. wahoo.

My 4th outdoor camera is coming in this week; I am estimating I'll get about 2 weeks of 2x1080p and 2x3mp @ 15fps & 8Mbit 24/7.. which is adequate for now.

 

[vector18]

What did you end up paying for the 4tb? I have been using 3tb's on all of my jobs and seeing an average of 2-4 weeks of recording due to programming constant record at 5fps and motion at 15fps. I'd like to be able to give my customers at least one month, but I don't want to spend 190.00 every time for a 4tb. I've been getting the 3tb's for around 125.00.

 

[nayr]

$169, less than a dollar per TB more than ur price on 3TB's

 

[Shockwave199]

What did you end up paying for the 4tb? I have been using 3tb's on all of my jobs and seeing an average of 2-4 weeks of recording due to programming constant record at 5fps and motion at 15fps. I'd like to be able to give my customers at least one month, but I don't want to spend 190.00 every time for a 4tb. I've been getting the 3tb's for around 125.00.

The purples seem to average around 10-20 bucks off when they go on sale, but it has not been often since I've been watching for a couple of months now. You have to watch every day and grab them when they go on sale, but it's not a huge savings regardless.

You know Vec, have you ever considered using wired PIR sensors as kind of a standard for your installs? It might be that if you use two of them or so, like for front and back of houses, and set each channel to record motion from them, you could do away with constant record and save a ton of archiving space. Or at least cut down on some channels doing constant recording. You could even set all pre records longer so you really get the full motion event from all channels. Maxing out hard drive space is of course a great thing, but you could probably get a ton more mileage out of 6tb's [3tb drives x2] with actual PIR sensors. I'm thinking of doing this myself and seeing how it goes.

 

[vector18]

On paper, it's a great idea, but for the most part, the cameras are all outdoor, so I would have to purchase outdoor motions, which are more money than indoor, than I would have to position them in the same sight as the camera, which would mean a bit of walk testing here and there, than running an additional wire, a 12vdc power source, etc, etc, etc. It's just too much work and time to make it a
standard. The only time I would consider using alarm motions, is if the customer requests email notifications from motion detection.

 

[dmanindfw]

Found something interesting when looking at WD red and purple drives. WD rates the annual workload of their drives. The purples they spec at 60 TB per year and I believe the reds were speced at 150TB per year.

Seagate says the following about workload ratings:

• Every HDD type has some safe threshold of workload that is now defined as the workload rate limit (WRL).
• As long as the workload doesn’t exceed the WRL, workload stress has very little to no impact on this product’s reliability and failure rate.
• When the workload exceeds the WRL, the reliability of this product will begin to decline.

With that being said it appears as though reds may be a safer bet for consumer and non-raid environments where you are running only 1 or 2 drives 24x7. For those only recording motion events it probably isnt a big deal.

 

[zmx]

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