Is there a large performance difference between HDD, SSD, and NVME Drives in terms of video playback?

[talisman2208]

So currently I'm using 8TB of NVME in a Raid 0 configuration for my BI drive. With 9 4K cameras, video playback is snappy and I'm quite happy with BI's performance.

Recently, I've been kind of craving a big more storage however, because this set up only allows me a few days of playback.

Thinking about going the NAS route, with either SSD's or HDD's. My question is - am I going to be taking a huge performance hit if I go this route? Or is a NAS with HDD's pretty snappy with the playback.

 

[biggen]

I only use SSDs for the OS install. All my clip footage is on 12TB+ spinners. There is no latency at all retrieving and watching prerecorded footage. It’s all very snappy.

 

[talisman2208]

I only use SSDs for the OS install. All my clip footage is on 12TB+ spinners. There is no latency at all retrieving and watching prerecorded footage. It’s all very snappy.

Do you think I'll have any issue on an Enclosure connected via thunderbolt?

 

[biggen]

Do you think I'll have any issue on an Enclosure connected via thunderbolt?

Not sure. Never used it. Thunderbolt is plenty fast with the later specs. I’m not a fan of external drives enclosures in general because most of the external enclosures run off regular USB. Thunderbolt is it’s own spec built specifically for bandwidth hungry devices.

I prefer internal enclosures running of SATA or SAS if we are talking about physical spinners.

 

[CrazyAsYou]

In this day n age with USB 3 and Thunderbolt, you'll not see much difference between externally attach storage and internally attached SATA for the purpose of things like CCTV footage as the bus speed is more than enough providing the external storage device is using a half decent controller. It's only when you start comparing benchmark results comparing things like random 4k reads from an NVMe drive and something on USB 3 you'll see big improvements but again this of more importance to OS boot drives than video footage. Although not external, for ages now, I have used a cheap 500 GB internal SATA SSD as my new folder which acts as a 48 hour store before farming off to an 8 TB spinner for longer retention - The SSD 48 hour buffer gives me ultra responsive viewing/seeking and I don't care if I wear it out in a few years as they're now so cheap to replace.

 

[bp2008]

Is there a large performance difference between HDD, SSD, and NVME Drives in terms of video playback?

Thinking about going the NAS route, with either SSD's or HDD's. My question is - am I going to be taking a huge performance hit if I go this route? Or is a NAS with HDD's pretty snappy with the playback.

Yes and no.

If you are only viewing one clip at a time, then the performance difference should not be large between SSD and HDD. Seeking will be slightly less responsive but still usable. I haven't tried storing the video on a NAS accessed via any network storage protocol, but I suspect SMB (Samba / Windows File Sharing) would incur another performance hit on top of that. Attaching a network storage object via iSCSI would likely yield less of a performance hit, but how much better I could not say.

The real difference comes when seeking with multiple cameras simultaneously via the timeline. For this, SSDs have a massive performance advantage over HDDs. It becomes more and more obvious the more cameras you have, especially if you are playing back from the same disk that is being actively recorded to. My continuous recording system now has 23 cameras recording to SSD (many of them not with sub streams), and I can click and drag to seek on the timeline and it is able to refresh the view of all 23 cameras 3-5 times per second while seeking. In fact it gets rather CPU intensive due to the added load on the video decoders since so many of the clips don't have a low res sub stream available. However if I go back a couple days to where the video has all been moved to a local HDD, then during a seeking operation it now takes 3-5 seconds or occasionally longer to load all 23 clips.

I should note however that for relatively small numbers of cameras, e.g. 5 cameras all with sub streams enabled, then the timeline seeking advantage of an SSD is greatly diminished.