Seagate drive bites the dust after 1 1/2 years

[Shockwave199]

I'm not sure how well or not 1 1/2 years is for a hard drive in these things. My analog drives never crapped out on me. But the seagate 3tb drive in a clients nvr died last night. It threw a bunch of disk error emails to let me know though, which was cool. This was the original drive that came pre-installed. A month ago I put in a 4tb purple drive and that drive is doing great thus far. The client is getting a second 4tb purple drive that I'll install and then he should be all set. Hopefully the drives last longer than the seagate, that's for sure. The drag of this seems to be that with a dahua, [possibly other brands as well?] when the current drive that's writing goes dead, it doesn't auto switch to your other drive. It drags the system down. I went there planning to try and reformat the drive but it literally kept the nvr from booting up properly after an attempt- black screen. Only when I unplugged it did the unit come back up and switch to the other drive. There should be a way to either remotely or locally switch drives and turn one off in the interface or software. I don't see any way to do that. So when a drive takes a dump, it really creates a problem until it's worked out locally under the hood. Unless I'm missing something... Anyway, long live purple drives...I hope!

 

[alastairstevenson]

So what model of Seagate drive was it? They are trying hard to recover from a bad reputation due to the high failure rates of their drives used in non-desktop environments such as NAS, RAID, Surveillance, set-top video storage etc.
The NAS forums (24x7 and RAID) are full of bad Seagate experiences, with WD making the running with their Red and Purple targeted ranges.
Plenty of comparative studies like this: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2089464/three-year-27-000-drive-study-reveals-the-most-reliable-hard-drive-makers.html

 

[Shockwave199]

I'll take a look when I pull it out for the purple swap next time I'm there. Thanks!

 

[Git]

I really like Western Digital - and they have great customer support

I had two, 2 TB drives in my home server with one mirroring the other for backup. The backup drive totally failed after 4 years (Caviar Black have a 5 year warranty) and WD replaced both of them since they were in a raid with brand new 3 TB drives.

Very pleased with them

 

[camcam]

Ya know if they replace the drives under warrantee I'm ok with that.

Here are a couple of articles that point toward the Seagate drives as being better.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/surveillance-hard-drive-performance,3831.html
http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/6403/seagate-surveillance-st4000vx000-4tb-hdd-review/index7.html

The 3TB drives seem to be the best value.
$122.77 at amazon for the ST3000VX006 with free delivery.
$114.99 at amazon for the WD30PURX with free delivery.

I found the Seagate Video Storage Selector a little limited as it always came up with ST3000VX006 as the 3TB drive to buy. The Western Digital selector was also not very helpful and seemed to be more consumer oriented. I did not like how WD hard drive space was measured in pictures and video and that they consistently refer to HD video as a measurement which as we know comes in many sizes. And both drives at both websites are rated for up to 32 "HD Video" cameras but at what frame size, frame rate or bitrate ?

It would be helpful if more if Seagate and Western digital would list their available drives in a more logical manor. For instance If you wanted to capture the stream of twelve 1080P cameras at 30FPS and 8192 Kb/s which hard drive would be the best choice.

I could not find any recommendation for formatting allocation size anywhere. I assume everyone is using the default 4096 bytes. With motion capture most of my video files are between are between 20-40MB.

So what drive to buy and what size to format it???

 

[fenderman]

Buy WD purple...format it standard....dont over think it.