SSD drive vs conventional hard drive

[marklyn]

Wondering if anyone here has replaced your drive that stores your clips/videos with a SSD drive and, if so, was there any noticeable improvement in playback or anything else for that matter.
I'm needing to replace my 8 year old HD with something else and don't know if it's worth the money to go SSD or just get a HD that is newer and much faster and obviously cheaper.
Would like to hear any pros and cons and what you have that makes you happy.

 

[Ssayer]

Choosing Hardware for Blue Iris

Buy refurbished. Don't build or buy new. The most cost-effective Blue Iris computers are refurbished business-class systems such as "HP EliteDesk" and "Dell OptiPlex". You can usually get a good deal by searching [URL='http://www.ebay.com/']Ebay[/URL] for specific CPU model numbers, and...

ipcamtalk.com

 

[TonyR]

As suggested in the link provided by @Ssayer above , use a surveillance-rated HDD for video surveillance clips (such as a WD Purple), as they are optimized and designed for constant writes.

Put Windows, the BI program and the BI db (datebase) folder on the SSD.

 

[avspin]

SSDs are faster but have a shorter life or limited writes. Although I use SSDs in my PC for active drives, I use platter HDs for storage, NAS etc. As said above Purple is best but Red will work also for constant writes.

 

[avspin]

I should also mention that I clone all of my HDs weekly & crashplan/dropbox instantly because it's not if a drive fails but when. No matter the type.

 

[biggen]

As been said, there isn't much reason for a SSD. Writes from surveillance are steady and sequential so you don't get any speed advantages going with a SSD.

The dollar/GB advantage of mechanical is also massive compared to that of a SSD. You can get a big fat 12TB+ drive for pennies compared to what it would cost for an Enterprise SSD of the same size.

 

[marklyn]

Good points. Will look into a surveillance type drive as listed above. Now, just need to find the sales and deals

 

[Nanookofthenorth]

I should also mention that I clone all of my HDs weekly & crashplan/dropbox instantly because it's not if a drive fails but when. No matter the type.

What do you use for cloning?

 

[avspin]

Macrium Reflect. I do it weekly but alternate two separate drives so I always have 4 weeks worth of backups & incremental. After running weekly I copy to an external drive and store in fire proof container. Then once a month I take a hard drive to my safe deposit box so I have it off site. Worst case I lost one month but I also have CrashPlan and drobox so very redundant.

 

[bp2008]

because it's not if a drive fails but when. No matter the type.

Yeah, sure is.

My backup Blue Iris server recently had its boot drive SSD become partly corrupted. It wouldn't boot into Windows anymore and I couldn't mount the C:\ partition in a different machine except with slow recovery software. So I moved that machine's 8TB purple drive into my unRAID server and mapped it directly to a Windows VM which now runs my second copy of Blue Iris. Within a week, I started seeing SMART warnings. I don't know how long it has been reallocating sectors but there are a few hundred new ones every time I log into the unRAID GUI and it is up to 19268 reallocated sectors as of today. I can hardly blame it. The drive has been writing nearly 9MB per second for the last 4 years. Still works though so I'm not ready to replace it yet.

 

[Flintstone61]

I use Macrium reflect as well. I'm running daily incrementals forever with one full back up every month. ( If i remember right) on most of my C:\ drives. I have a bar/restaurnt POS server running a full clone everynight at 4AM when the place is closed. Thats the one that runs credit cards, and the financial stuff. $$$ The Bios is set to boot drive0 and then drive 1, so if primary dies, it''ll be running on Drive1 for them until somebody calls me.

 

[IReallyLikePizza2]

I have gotten substantially better performance overall since moving all new clip storage to SSD's. I have a bunch of Intel DC S3610 and S3700 Enterprise SSD's laying around, so I threw 2 x 800GB ones in my BI system to handle all new incoming clips

These SSD's are a little older, but they support 10 drive writes per day for 5 years (so 8TB every single day of writes, so overall over 14 petabytes of writes) (Intel® SSD DC S3700 Series (800GB, 2.5in SATA 6Gb/s, 25nm, MLC) Product Specifications)

These things are bulletproof and will outlast just about any hard drive. My setup is that all new 24/7 and motion clips go to these SSD's, and then they eventually move off into a a pool of random hard drives

 

[bp2008]

Did you buy your enterprise SSDs from ebay? Can you tell how much of the theoretical endurance has been used? I mean, 14 petabytes is a ridiculously huge amount even for continuous video writing, but you never know what a server operator may have used them for.

I looked up that model on ebay and the price seems pretty decent considering what they are. I'd be a lot more comfortable writing continuous video to one of those than a consumer SSD with a tenth or less of the endurance. I'd fill up the 800 GB model in about one day with my continuous recording BI server. If that meant drastically faster seeking on the first day of recording, it might be worth trying out

 

[IReallyLikePizza2]

No, I actually got them new from our Intel rep as "samples" a while ago

Either way, I wouldn't hesitate to get one used, they are very overbuilt so even past 14PB I suspect they would keep working without issue. They have a ton of blocks built in as reserve to replace bad blocks as they go. I suspect they are actually 1TB SSD's and have 200~GB of blocks spare

So far my two have a power on time of 3 years, they were used as Cache drives in a NAS before this and saw a lot of writes, and now they are in the NVR, and so far they have not used a single block from the pool

 

[biggen]

Those are nice drives @IReallyLikePizza2! I love the Intel Enterprise SSDs. I run a pair of D3-4610 in my Proxmox host. The BI VM I run sits on these pair in a RAID 1 configuration. They support 3 DWPD for 5 years so they don’t have quite the endurance you have but still more than I’ll ever need and they are cheap!

I still like mechanicals for surveillance since storage sizes are massive. But eventually SSDs will overtake mechanical drives in the next few years even for this use.

 

[TonyR]

I still like mechanicals for surveillance since storage sizes are massive. But eventually SSDs will overtake mechanical drives in the next few years even for this use.

+1^^.
And hopefully be as affordable then as the consumer SSDs are now, but with the endurance and performance of those enterprise SSDs.

 

[bp2008]

Most consumer SSDs cut costs by storing more bits of data per physical memory cell, and as I understand it the more they store, the slower it is to write and the lower the endurance gets.

There's SLC, MLC, TLC, and QLC, storing 1, 2, 3, or 4 bits per cell respectively, and getting progressively slower to write to, and lower endurance. But also less expensive for the capacity. I don't know how much further they can stretch it.

Many QLC SSDs try to make up for their slower performance by using some of the physical media in "SLC" mode to act as a cache, so if you wanted to write for example a 50 GB file, the first 32 GB might be fast, and the last 18 GB would be really slow because the SLC cache is full. Over time, the SLC cache gets transferred to QLC so that it is available for fast writing again.

 

[bp2008]

One of my favorite SSDs a while ago was the Intel 660p 2TB which I bought two of for $185 each. These are great for typical consumer use, but would be awful for continuous NVR writing because they only have endurance of 400 TB. That is basically 200 full drive writes. So all it would take to hit the endurance spec within the 5 year warranty period would be 219 GB per day, or about one full drive write every 9 days. Any faster than that and you would go over the endurance spec within 5 years. At the rate my secondary BI server writes, it would take me only a year and half.

 

[IReallyLikePizza2]

I bet it would be fine though, check this out

The SSD Endurance Experiment: They're all dead

I never thought this whole tech journalism gig would turn me into a mass murderer. Yet here I am, with the blood of six SSDs on my hands, and that’s...

techreport.com

 

[handinpalm]

Here is a good quick guide for SSD NAND Flash memory.

Everything You Need to Know About SLC, MLC, & TLC NAND Flash :: Blogs :: MY Blog :: MyDigitalDiscount.com