Author Topic: hard drive health in cctv system?  (Read 3284 times)

hard drive health in cctv system?
on: April 26, 2018, 01:47:12 AM
I'm swapping over to IP cctv cameras at work  (20x3mp 12x4mp)

storage server for them is in a nice 24 hard drive bay server case, in a server rack (this is shockingly profesional compared to the old system)

right now it has a boot ssd, 10x4tb and 1x6tb drives in it

one 3pm camera recording at 20fps for 24hours uses about 400gig

10 cameras running right now, but more are being added pretty quick, going to add a lot more drives soon too

I'll probably turn the recording fps down later on so storage doesn't get crazy (I like at least a months worth saved)


so what's better for the drives?

right now the software that the camera manufacturer (Dahua) works pretty well, records 24/7, never crashes and uses naff all cpu (uses direct to disk, not all software does)

it fills the first hard drive, then moves onto the next... on and on... when it runs out of space it deletes the oldest footage and writes new... on and on...

is it better to let the drives run like that? - if I knock fps back so I run 4tb/day (46meg/sec) - it'll run a drive for 24hours constantly writing to it then the drive will shut down and wait for the other drives to fill before it has another turn

or... should I have the drives in raid? - maybe batches of 4x4tb ? - so the dries will be written to for 4 days, but at 1/4 or the speed?

or... run a freenas box with zfs - which I think would let me run all the drives as one big pool writing to all of them at the same time - 24/7 but very slowly?

data security/backup isn't really a problem, it's not mission critical suff



I thought raid or zfs would be better... but then started thinking letting the drives shut down is better? - old system runs like that and I've never had a drive fail... some were used when I put them in... one of the drives is a 700gig drive from when 700gig was one of the biggest drives you could get, and it still runs perfect :-o

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  • Offline Clock'd 0Ne

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Re: hard drive health in cctv system?
Reply #1 on: April 26, 2018, 07:18:08 AM
Cycling power to drives is generally worse for them I thought? If you wanted parity in case of failure you could set up unRAID and pool all the drives into a big disk but still have a parity disk in case one fails.

Re: hard drive health in cctv system?
Reply #2 on: April 26, 2018, 13:14:11 PM
not really bothered about backups, only really need to check the footage if we've been burgled and what's the chance of a drive dieing right as/after we've been bugled?


I thought there's be some info online for big raid vs power cycling (or something like that) but can;t find anything at all :-(

  • Offline matt5cott

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Re: hard drive health in cctv system?
Reply #3 on: April 26, 2018, 21:52:56 PM
Do you have to run 24/7? Have you experienced issues with record on motion detection?

Re: hard drive health in cctv system?
Reply #4 on: April 26, 2018, 22:39:59 PM
motion detect was a bit aff with the old analog system, had to dump it back then and switch to 24/7 recording

I'm not really worried about the amount of storage I need.. £800 ish will add another 40tb bringing me up to 80tb

I don't want to waste money... but I'd pay 800 in the blink of an eye for footage of a burglar etc.


I'm just a bit worried about hard drive health... maybe needlessly ?

  • Offline bear

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Re: hard drive health in cctv system?
Reply #5 on: May 04, 2018, 00:22:06 AM
It seems like linux file system have an easier time with SSD, I had ones that stopped working with windows but happly works with linux mint, test said it had half of it's reserve sectors gone.

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