Deciphering hard drives

B

born2ride

Getting the hang of it
Mar 9, 2014
380
10
New Jersey
I recently lost two hard drives one was a WD and the other was a Seagate. I'm looking for two 3 TB drives. One will be for recordings of BI and the other just to store tv shows. I'm thinking the nas red series or possibly the purple since just read about it other thread. I my question is can someone explain what make a drive better or worse? Write,read, etc.? In simple terms!
The tv show drive will be housed in my HTPC .
 
If you want to get technical just google it. Here is the bottom line, for NVR/DVR's some manufactures recommend specific drives. If you are going to put it in a PC based nvr or htpc, just get a drive designed for NAS or the purple drive designed for NVR's both will work just fine, they are designed to run 24/7. The price difference is negligible so if you are recording cameras to it just get the purple and call it a day. You cant go wrong with a 3 year warranty.
 
It is a tough world out there in terms of hard drive reliability. Seagate seems to be getting more of a bad rep.

WD did split up their series a bit more with slightly varying price points whether basic basic drive, fast desktop, nas, surveillance, ...

Whether one color drive is truly better/faster/more reliable than another series remains to be seen (I don't know there's comparative studies on that, yet). Some people argue that they are the very same wd drives with the same reliability but with just a minor part change or two, if that, and really only tweaked firmware to designate/lock/unlock certain features or capabilities.

Whether it is worth the extra 10 or 20, who knows? One can read about hard drives, specs, tests, reliability, etc till your eyes hurt.

When it came down to it, for my diy little nvr system, I followed Intel's advice of using a guaranteed compatible / approved SSD for the OS etc. (eliminating whatever testing and ownership/return/exchange headache if non-approved doesn't work out of the box) and for video storage I followed WD's guidelines: video/nvr = purple, for the differences geared to continuous recording.

See also:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7771/...llance-storage-market-with-purple-hard-drives
 
icerabbit said:
One can read about hard drives, specs, tests, reliability, etc till your eyes hurt. [QUOTE]

Yes that's where I am . I was just looking to see about rpm ,cache . Most listed are 7200 rpm ,64mb cache.Now is this good? can I write faster with a different drive but keeping same price range? .. Do i even need to write faster?..
Right now I am talking about from one drive to another in same pc. Transferring large movie files for the HTPC..
Secondly what about Blue Iris writing to a drive in a PC.

Thanks for link!!
Click to expand...
 
Yes, 7200rpm and 64mb cache would be considered good.

I think for a primary / operating system drive, one should get a fast drive. Period. I used to always pick 7200rpm drives over 5400rpm drives and extra cache for that reason. Then for mass storage, with infrequent access, top speed isn't critical. The world in hard drives has changed a bit though, in that with the number of platters, platter density, etc. rotational speed isn't necessarily the key factor any more. Density and platters can be (low density 7200rpm drive vs high density 5400rpm drive). Of course these days. Forget about 120MB/s HDD speed for a primary drive. Now we're moving 300MB, 400MB, 500MB per second with SSDs.

Back to hard drives. Does one need an above average hard drive to record video data? Possibly. It will depend on the number of cameras and how much data each camera stream requires to be written to disk, either in 24hr mode or motion detection mode. Motion detection, one can think well that's just a moment here and there, when somebody walks past or drives up. That's what I thought. Until I set up my first camera; and the wind starts blowing and branch shadows dart across the property, rain starts falling, snow starts blowing, ... The cameras don't distinguish between weather and people. Movement = record. So, the more channels you have, at the higher resolution; the more you need some headroom for recording when all cameras suddenly require it.

I've always liked tom's hardware. This might be good to glance at:

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/...te-Throughput-Average-h2benchw-3.16,2904.html

It'll give you a quick idea on some common drives, the fact that rpms aren't the sole speed factor, etc.

PS: In my testing I am seeing a 3mp camera set to 1920x1080 at above average quality settings in h264; produce streams at about 1MB/s. Depends on what they see, fps, etc. Right now my little system is looking at four of those streams, maybe tweaked down the settings a little towards average and network data in is 2MB/s. I"m not sure yet how/when exactly a hard drive becomes the bottleneck; if streams randomly want to be stored to hard drive and things start queuing up. Right now I"m trying to see what my little core i5 machine is doing cpu and heat wise; while keeping 4 streams on display.
 
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Great Information thanks you.. How would one know or find out actual MB speeds on a drive when empty, 50% or 75% full? .. I noticed the fuller drive I have is slower than same drive with less stuff.
 
Well ... now you have some neurons trying to fire in my brain. There are benchmark tools that will look at speed differences between inner and outer platter. But, I think any slow down you notice as the drive fills up would have to be fragmentation, where files have been deleted, shrunk, grown etc. and the data is not represented in a contiguous matter for it to be read. Some good defragmentation should help with that. (or offloading all the data, a quick wipe of free space and loading it back on)
 
... one of the things I've always done from back in the early days is partition any system drive into two or three parts. That way a c: could be OS, programs, and regular stuff. D: and E: would be available to separate out data and archive it. It really lessened data fragmentation, and made it easier for the clean swipe OS install every six months to a year.
 
Forget all the stats and colors, just get the best deal on an 7200 6gbit sata drive you can find ($100 for 3tb on newegg). Use a SSD for your OS, and MSFT Storage Spaces to create one 6tb Space with your 2 drives and backup to some other device as desired. Spanning 2 drives in storage spaces will give you 2x the performance of a single drive. If desired, create 2 logical drives, one with a 2way mirror for your movies. If you run out of space, just add another drive to the pool...

If you want even more protection, mirror your SSD OS drive.



Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
 
I used storage spaces once. It corrupted itself and I had to use expensive recovery software to get my data back. Never again.
 
You have to love data corruption, especially across multiple drives! Come on now. With each drive holding 1/2 1/3 1/4 etc of the data, needing to rebuild, taking days, getting errors and/or application crashes along the way, drives overheating, ... :sick: :miserable: :mad-new:

That's why I favor KISS whenever and wherever I can.
 
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