Which HDD for 12 Cams

R

rfj

Pulling my weight
Oct 26, 2014
414
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I purchased an 8TB Barracuda a while ago as a dedicated drive for BI to record video. It was a disaster. I went back to my 2TB drive but it's only enough for 2 days of recording which isn't enough. Hence, I am looking for a new drive. I know WD has the Surveillance type of drives and Seagate the Skyhawk drives for just that purpose. However, they are pretty expensive. Is there a significant advantage those drives have or are most people just using simple 7200rpm CMR drives? Note that I currently have 11 cams each producing about 1MBytes/s. I will probably add another 4 cams so that will be 15 streams (individual file being written to).
 
I'm not having any trouble with my Purple drive. They are made for this purpose. You may be able to get away with a drive not made for this purpose, but why not use the equipment made for this. Obviously the Purple drives are more expensive, but it's not terrible and this purpose is very demanding.
$190 for an 8GB Purple drive isn't too bad, IMO:
 
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I have a 6Tb Seagate surveillance drive and an 8Tb barracuda compute drive and have never had any issues.

Prior to that I had a pair of 2Tb WD green drives which are from from surveillance drives as you could get and again no issues.

I have split my 9 cams across the 2 drives though which could be why I’ve not had any issues?
 
Another less expensive way for larger drives is to "shuck" one of the stand-alone USB drives WD sells as the My Book/Elements/EasyStore lines that you can find on sale often. At higher capacities they're their high MTBF white-labeled enterprise drives. I've run several of the 8 and 12 TB as surveillance drives and NAS for years with no issues. You do lose the warranty though when you crack them open.
 
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