Second Dead Hard Disk in BI system

quest100

quest100

Pulling my weight
Aug 10, 2018
161
242
CA
About a year ago I had a ?WD Purple? hard disk fail in my system.

Just had a second hard disk die in my BI system.

Current system has one internal hard disk and four external hard disk, all dedicated for video storage. The external disks are split between two dual eSATA cases driven by a PCI eSATA card with dual eSATA ports. The 18 cameras in my system are recording around 270 Mbps over Ethernet and are on 24/7.

The latest disk that died was a 3 year old, 14 TB Seagate Skyhawk disk. The first symptoms I noticed was erratic increased disk usage as displayed in Task Manager --> Performance. Instead of an active time of a few percent both disks (F and G) in one external enclosure would often jump up to 100%. I then did a speed test and disk G would stutter and pause.

To figure out why I performed a variety of tests (note - I have a third identical external eSATA case):
  1. Swap cable ends at PC
  2. Swap cable ends at enclosures
  3. Swap power supplies
  4. Replace power supply
  5. Switch disks within case
  6. Move disk to third identical case
  7. Move enclosure from PC to Mac and use USB port for testing.
Always erratic until I tested on the Mac using SoftRAID's verify test. Disk F tested fine for as long as I let it run. Disk G popped up an error within a couple of minutes and then verify quit a minute later warning me that I might have to restart my computer.

I have now ordered a replacement disk (24 TB Seagate Iron Wolf Pro) and temporarily moved the cameras from disk G to the remaining disks. At this point I am hoping that the fundamental problem is a bad disk and not one of my enclosures causing a disk to go bad.
 
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quest100 said:
About a year ago I had a ?WD Purple? hard disk fail in my system.

Just had a second hard disk die in my BI system.

Current system has one internal hard disk and four external hard disk, all dedicated for video storage. The external disks are split between two dual eSATA cases driven by a PCI eSATA card with dual eSATA ports. The 18 cameras in my system are recording around 270 Mbps over Ethernet and are on 24/7.

The latest disk that died was a 3 year old, 14 TB Seagate Skyhawk disk. The first symptoms I noticed was erratic increased disk usage as displayed in Task Manager --> Performance. Instead of an active time of a few percent both disks (F and G) in one external enclosure would often jump up to 100%. I then did a speed test and disk G would stutter and pause.

To figure out why I performed a variety of tests (note - I have a third identical external eSATA case):
  1. Swap cable ends at PC
  2. Swap cable ends at enclosures
  3. Swap power supplies
  4. Replace power supply
  5. Switch disks within case
  6. Move disk to third identical case
  7. Move enclosure from PC to Mac and use USB port for testing.
Always erratic until I tested on the Mac using SoftRAID's verify test. Disk F tested fine for as long as I let it run. Disk G popped up an error within a couple of minutes and then verify quit a minute later warning me that I might have to restart my computer.

I have now ordered a replacement disk (24 TB Seagate Iron Wolf Pro) and temporarily moved the cameras from disk G to the remaining disks. At this point I am hoping that the fundamental problem is a bad disk and not one of my enclosures causing a disk to go bad.
Click to expand...
The drive might be still under warranty.
 
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After more testing and using the new disk I determined that external case failed while running with the eSATA interface. The case works fine using its USB interface. I am now running my BI system using eSATA in one enclosure and USB with the other. Looking at them in Performance Monitor they are active just a few per cent of the time. Can’t tell any real difference performance wise between the two interfaces. And have no problems.

I always see warnings not to use USB for storing video. Is this advice just a holdover from the older USBs? I have absolutely no problems storing about 130 Mbps over a single 10 Gbps USB connection to an external enclosure containing two disks.
 
quest100 said:
I always see warnings not to use USB for storing video.
Click to expand...

I don't understand this either. USB 3 (gen 1) is rated at 5 Gbps or 10 Gbps for gen2. SATA III is rated 6 Gbps so you can theoretically get better performance with a Gen2 USB. Durability is the same or better in an external drive as they generally run a bit cooler. I need to do some thread searching on the why for. My USB QNAP TR-004 has been chugging along now for quite a few years in continuous service without any issues. Hmm...
 
The theoretical transfer speed of USB 3.0 is 4.8 Gbit/s (600MBps) and when I tested it with 2 cameras for the live recording, it started stalling after 25min. It can't keep up with the sustained, non-buffering of video cameras.

Theoretical and real-world and sustained are totally different numbers.

It can even struggle with moving already recorded video over.

So here is a real-world demonstration. I was trying to move roughly 260GB of data from NEW to STORED.



1707679334607.png




I was moving it from a WD Purple (750 MBps) through a USB 3.0 (625MBps) port to another WD Purple HDD (750MBps)

At first it said it would take about 2 hours to move 260GB, but look how fast it dropped to a transfer of 37.7MB/s



1707679646228.png




Two hours came and went. About 6 hours later, the speed had dropped to less than 2 MB/s.

260 GB (260,000 MB) should have taken 416 seconds or less than 7 minutes at the theoretical speeds.



1707679739436.png




Those speeds just are not going to cut it for live recording of non buffering video.

Some say they work just fine, but I suspect they simply haven't had an incident happen yet where they found out they are missing recordings.
 
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Hmmm.... Something's strange there. When I image drives to my TR-004 (USB dock to USB TR-004) it rarely drops below 1Gbps. (It's not the 5Gbps the spec says it should be but both read and write are on the same USB buss.)
 
Absolutely wasting your time using USB / eSata to transfer security video 24.7.365! :facepalm: In 2024 the only method to connect and transfer data is via Ethernet, SFP. :thumb: As it relates to the failed drive I would echo the other members thoughts about checking if the HDD is still under warranty.
 
Just thought I would post an update. For the last month I have been running the three external hard disks using USB with no problems. As far as I can tell absolutely no glitches recording and/or playing back video due to the USB interface.

After a power failure, which exceeded my UPS’s one hour backup time, one of the external drive cases would not mount. I finally got it working again by swapping its external power supply. I no longer trust the old external cases and replaced them with a single case capable of holding up to five drives as just a bunch of disks. I now suspect that my original problems were caused by degrading power supply’s. I can easily imagine that marginal voltages would fluctuate enough to cause disk problems.
 
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quest100 said:
After a power failure, which exceeded my UPS’s one hour backup time, one of the external drive cases would not mount. I finally got it working again by swapping its external power supply. I no longer trust the old external cases and replaced them with a single case capable of holding up to five drives as just a bunch of disks. I now suspect that my original problems were caused by degrading power supply’s. I can easily imagine that marginal voltages would fluctuate enough to cause disk problems.
Click to expand...

That definitely sounds like it was your issue, very unusual to have drives go bad like that without either heat or voltage being a problem.
 
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This website is great, I have learned a lot here.

For about 2-1/2 years I have been using an USB 3.1 Gen2 external case with 5 IronWolf NAS 12TB drives.
I am currently recording 16 cameras 24/7 to this RAID without problems.
Some very well respected people on this forum doubt and even laugh at the idea of mixing any USB and IPCams, yet I've had YEARS of SOLID PERFORMANCE.
We all like seeing data, I have no fancy graphics or disk testing programs, but I do have a stopwatch and I can drag to copy.

So thought I would try a couple real-world tests.

First test
I transferred a 7.61 Gig file from this Raid to a SSD, transfer time was 19 seconds, while still recording all 16 cameras.

Second test
Selected two folders 24 files each, totaling 48 files, with a combined 367.14 GB.
Stopped Recording all 16 cameras to RAID.
Dragged the two folders totaling 367.14 GB to a SSD.
Total time to completely copy all 367.14 GB was 17 minutes 12 seconds

So why are people having such different experiences?
I don't know!

Thoughts/guesses below are not answers - just things that might be possible.
Feel free to rule them out or add to the list.

1) USB 3.1 Gen2 controller chips inside different computers can have different performance, just like different model 4K cameras can have different night performance.
2) USB host port may have hub inside computer so several USB connection ports on back of computer will share one host port.
3) If fast USB device(3.2 - hard drive) is on same host port as slow device(2.0 - keyboard) all devices on that host port are limited to USB speed of slowest device.
4) I believe Thunderbolt has its own processor, USB uses the computers main processor so USB can be affected by CPU load.
5) Not all computer cables are created equal.

Some say just won't work, but I suspect they simply haven't yet found out their true performance bottleneck.
 
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I have failed multiple Seagate surveillance drives in some of my BlueIris systems and Ubiquiti systems. I switch to Seagate Exos drives and never a issue so far

A bad/slow HHD makes you want to pull out hairs from your head. It can cause the weirdest issues
 
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quest100 said:
After more testing and using the new disk I determined that external case failed while running with the eSATA interface. The case works fine using its USB interface. I am now running my BI system using eSATA in one enclosure and USB with the other. Looking at them in Performance Monitor they are active just a few per cent of the time. Can’t tell any real difference performance wise between the two interfaces. And have no problems.

I always see warnings not to use USB for storing video. Is this advice just a holdover from the older USBs? I have absolutely no problems storing about 130 Mbps over a single 10 Gbps USB connection to an external enclosure containing two disks.
Click to expand...

Great catch! Thanks for documenting the findings, and the follow-up, here for others to benefit from.
 
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quest100 said:
Just thought I would post an update. For the last month I have been running the three external hard disks using USB with no problems. As far as I can tell absolutely no glitches recording and/or playing back video due to the USB interface.
Click to expand...
Another update: I am half way through moving 2TB of bvr files from an internal hard disk to one of the three disks in my external USB enclosure. All while BI is busy writing to all five disks in my system. The copy speed is stable around 150 MB/s and BI seems to not have noticed. This is around 50% of the max data transfer spec for this drive of 287 MB/s.

I have no qualms about using external USB enclosures for storing BI camera feeds - at least if you have a recent computer and enclosure that truly supports 5 or 10 GB/s. No opinion for older slower USB interfaces or poorly made devices.
 
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Read the 2023 Drive Stats Report and the latest insights on drive failure from Andy Klein. Read the 2023 Drive Stats Report and the latest insights on drive failure from Andy Klein.
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