HDD Upgrade - Security System

bigone5500

Well-Known Member
I'm looking at upgrading my HDD in the NVR. The drive below seems to be a good choice. It has 4x more storage than I currently have. Is there a better choice?

Amazon product
 

RandyDSok

Well-Known Member
Since I don't know what you know... I'll do the safe assumption and assume that is nothing, always the best practice when giving out information or recommendations. I don't have direct use recommendations for surveillance quality drives and they make new models all of the time, so if I had, it'd likely be dated by now. Instead I'll just stick with the easy part... the info you need to know in order to pick from a sea of hard drives.

The way I think of HDD's or any part for that matter... is by the type of use they going to be used for and the reliability they will have. For the reliability arena, I generically refer to them as good for home or small business ( this is what most of us will have in our systems )... and good for enterprise use which has a much higher reliability rating and a larger MTBF rating ( mean time between failure, the bigger the better of course ) than the previous.

Surveillance drives fall into the enterprise level of drives and as such cost more. The surveillance drives ( DVR and NVR are these also, just different naming is all ) you not only want a high MTBF rating but they are going to be writing something close to 95% of the time 24/7. So write speeds are more important than their read speeds and as such, make them more expensive than many of the other types of enterprise level drives. The other types of enterprise level drives are either made for faster read speeds vs the write speeds or they are made for archive storage where capacity is the primary goal and write speeds are less of a factor.

So you will want a surveillance qualified drive that has the capacity that you are looking for. If you try to use a drive made for one of the other tasks instead, it will either not have the performance you are looking for or the longevity just depending on which type you pick up.

The following may be dated but was correct the last time I looked for a surveillance drive. Western Digital's surveillance drives are known as their Purple drives. Seagate's are known as their SkyHawk line. Toshiba's drives are named as their S 300 line. I'm uncertain if HGST has a name for theirs or not but they are a good brand, just make sure it mentions being made for surveillance.

I believe once you have a make/model in mind... a google search should come up with some decent info about how good that specific make/model is...
 

bigone5500

Well-Known Member
I assume the Amazon link isn't showing for you? It's the WD purple 4tb with 256mb cache. Here is a screenshot.

Screenshot_20221029_141831.jpg
 

RandyDSok

Well-Known Member
I assume the Amazon link isn't showing for you? It's the WD purple 4tb with 256mb cache. Here is a screenshot.

View attachment 24449

You were correct... somehow my adblocker got re-enabled on this site ... probably had an update that reset it I guess.

I don't know any current info about the WD Purple series but a little bit back ( a few years ) they had great reviews. If they haven't cut corners since, I'd still guess they are decent. I did a real quick search for reviews and didn't see anything very recent... but I only looked at a couple of pages also assuming that if you were serious, you'd feel like looking deeper than I did.
 

Tony

Staff member
Yep, ad blockers block the amazon links. Mine was reenabled as well.

I have heard good things about the WD Purple. The only thing I would do is check with your vendor of your NVR as I have seen some that have a 2TB limit. As long as yours can support 4TB, that is a great choice.
 

bigone5500

Well-Known Member
I got an email reply from harbor freight. They said the max drive capacity for this system is 4TB.

Great!
 

bigone5500

Well-Known Member
I just wonder. If I format an 8gb and create two partitions could it be used as two separate drives?
 

RandyDSok

Well-Known Member
I just wonder. If I format an 8gb and create two partitions could it be used as two separate drives?

No .. If their info is correct ( of course ). The drive size limit is based on the number of cylinders x heads x sectors ( C x H x S ) limits ... not based on partition sizes. Today ( and as has been for decades ) the C x H x S values are translated and aren't physical numbers as they used to be... the numerical limits are the same. On computers, once a limit is met, the process just starts counting again starting at 1. Imaginary example... say all of those numbers ( C x H x S ) multiply out to 100... once they finish reading/writing number 100, it then starts over at 1 again which then again reads or starts rewriting over the top of the previous information. Of course modern drives tell the computer what their sizes are so that shouldn't happen but if the computer doesn't support that size, it should error out.
 
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