Your thoughts on 24x7 recording?

[Perimeter]

Solid state recording devices, SD cards included, basically have a finite number of writes. A smaller card will have to overwrite more often that a larger card and will not last as long.

I know. That is why I am currently more inclined to do 24/7 only on the NVR. From the calculator, each cam will have a full day of recording time on 64 GB cards before it gets overwritten. It boils down to how much event recording each camera will be doing. A test run gave 8 GB in about a month. So that would be 2 overwrites in a year.

Which failure is sooner detected? HDD in NVR or SD in cam?

The other key question seems to me, what size is best to pick as HDD. What gives in first? The motor, the plater, something else? Will a drive of twice the size live twice as long? (Assuming that archive size is not critical)

 

[wittaj]

Most do not record continuous on the SD card as some of the cameras start to get wonky trying to figure out what to overwrite.

Most of us have had to re-format the SD card to make the camera stable again.

Most will experience an SD card failure before HDD as the SD card is more in the elements.

WD Purple is the best choice.

Typically the larger the drive the longer the duration.

 

[Perimeter]

Most do not record continuous on the SD card as some of the cameras start to get wonky trying to figure out what to overwrite.

Did you make this experience with a T5442T? I will be using those.

Most will experience an SD card failure before HDD as the SD card is more in the elements.

My question was actually aiming at failure detection. When do you realize the medium failed? Which medium will become obvious sooner?

Due to your councel, I ended up with a NVR that can operate 2x HDD. Looks as if they can be set in redundancy mode. I could just use up my old HDDs that way.

And totally OT but also on my mind: How long do IR LED last if the cam runs outside 24/7?

 

[samplenhold]

You realize it failed when it no longer can be viewed or your system tells you it is failing. SD cards in cams will not give you a warning. One day you will try to view something and it will not work.

Some systems will give you a warning for HDD beginning to fail, like a SMART error message.

I have had two Dahua 5231 turrets running IR all night since January 2019 and they are still doing fine. You will probably replace a cam due to newer ones being so much better than due to a failed IR LED.

 

[looney2ns]

Before I go down the wrong path on 24x7 recording, I'd like to ask what people's thoughts are on this topic.

I was thinking of doing this but today I was spurred on because my front IDENTIFY camera didn't catch some motion and thus didn't catch my neighbor nor his car leaving, even though my OBSERVATION camera got it. It was nothing serious, more a curiosity.

I am now thinking I should record the OBSERVATION cam on a 24x7 basis. This is because a kind member here suggested doing that in case of the very thing that happened today (a camera missed an event).

So my questions:
1) should I record the main stream or the substream?
2) should I try any of the technologies to try to reduce bandwidth and amount of data captured? e.g. for now, I'm running all cameras on H.264 even though I have an Intel+VPP capable I5-8500T CPU. Should I change to H.265 (as an example)? I'm not so worried about disk space as I am about overtaxing the CPU because I want to add more cameras in the future.
3) Should I record the data directly to the hard drive? Currently, because I'm only tinkering with BI, I have everything on the Windows 10 SSD. I think the default is to record data there always and then transfer longer-term storage to somewhere else (e.g. NAS or hard drive) and I think many people here are skipping the writing to the SSD part.
4) Which cameras? I am thinking that I don't need to record all of the cameras 24x7. For example, the anti-porch-pirating camera has nothing interesting nearly always. I'm thinking it's wasteful to record that 24x7. How about the IDENTIFY cameras? I am leaning towards "no" for those. I am leaning towards "yes" for both overview (OBSERVATION) cameras.

If you have cameras that are capable of using AI tripwires or intrusion box's, that will do a much better job at catching motion triggers in a lot of case's.

 

[ipmania]

So I plan on using the recorder in 24/7 mode while I would use the SD cards only for detections. That way, I can use smaller cards and won't have to replace them as quickly.

I have found that SD cards have come down in price so much over the years that, for me, they are a bargain even for the large ones. So in my photography hobby, I have settled on 256GB cards. I have a variety of them split between 2 brands: Samsung and Sandisk and so far, they have held up over the past 2 or 3 years with lots of photos taken.

The Sandisk ones are even marked as "High Endurance" and are advertised as "Ideal for dash cams and home monitoring systems". The best thing: they are cheap at only $40 CAD.

My comment was not necessarily at recommending those 2 brands, but that SD cards are fairly inexpensive these days and perhaps you shouldn't focus on getting smaller cards because, unlike HDDs, if you double the SD card size, you're going to get double the life because electronic media has a limited life.

(A bonus for use in photography is that the larger SD cards are a lot faster and, importantly, stay fast until the end. I've had older 8GB and 32GB Sandisk Extreme Pro cards get slower and slower as they get fuller. For photography, this will mean that it will take longer to clear bursts of photos when the cards get fuller. I'm not sure if this has an impact for security cam footage. )

 

[ipmania]

The other key question seems to me, what size is best to pick as HDD. What gives in first? The motor, the plater, something else? Will a drive of twice the size live twice as long? (Assuming that archive size is not critical)

From my own anecdotal experience (which is woefully out of date), HDD failures are infrequent and have the highest chance (still very small) at the beginning of their lives. If they survive an initial period, they will likely survive for years.

As they age, as with all mechanical things, the chances of them failing rise, but are still small. I've had drives be DOA from new.

Recently as I picked through my parts bin for an HDD for my BI recording test, I came across two 400GB SATA drives that I retired from operation in a light-duty home server. I saw on a handwritten post-it note on the drives: "Working. Ok to wipe. BUT have been in 24x7 operation for 15 years". I might mount one of those drives in a shadow box on the wall. Who knows how much longer the drives would have continued to work. The only reason I retired the server was that the capacitors on the motherboard went bad.

 

[ipmania]

My question was actually aiming at failure detection. When do you realize the medium failed? Which medium will become obvious sooner?

Due to your councel, I ended up with a NVR that can operate 2x HDD. Looks as if they can be set in redundancy mode. I could just use up my old HDDs that way.

If you're going to reuse old HDDs, it'd be wise to use them in this redundancy mode (RAID1). Hopefully, the NVR can alert you somehow that one of the HDDs had failed, otherwise, you won't be able to tell until the other drive fails and you'll still have data loss on your hands.

 

[Perimeter]

I just took a look at WD Purple 4TB for 24/7 recording. I found there exist several WD Purple 4TB HDD. They are called WD42PURZ, WD43PURZ. They even have different spec details. Is there something to observe when buying a WD Purple for 24/7?

 

[Flintstone61]

Some are 5640 RPM some are 5400 RPM some are 7200 RPM.
I have a WDC WD82PURZ 7200 rpm that is noiser than my WD84PURZ 5640 RPM.
I have 2 WD42PURZ they are 5400
a wd63purz is showing a 5460 rpm
a wd62purz is probably a generation older.

 

[Injunfarian]

I had the same issues which is why I moved to a setup where I could record 24/7, I also noticed that you were from Canada as well. There is a sale on at Canada Computers that I feel like is a decent price for the size of the HD it is a 8TB 7200RPM NAS drive that will fit more than enough footage I feel for my needs. It is only $179.99.

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