Surveillance Drives vs NAS/Enterprise

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Vegalyp

New Member
Sep 28, 2020
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So, the short of the story is that I am implementing an NVR setup for 24/7 recording and am trying to find documentation on HDD's. I know SSD's are amazing, but for an NVR with 24/7 recording, there is no way I can currently afford SSD's with near enough capacity.

My issue is in how little documentation and benchmarks exist for Surveillance drives vs NAS/Enterprise drives.

I can see that surveillance drives are rated for more write speed over read speed and NAS/Enterprise drives are rated for a balanced approach to read/write speed. But my question is what workload is needed to fully saturate the write speed of a NAS/Enterprise drive to warrant usage of a surveillance drive. Further, the warranty of WD Red Pro and Enterprise drives of 5 years (Current issues surrounding WD aside) surpasses their Purple surveillance drives' warranty of 3 years. Seagate is in the same position with their Skyhawk and Skyhawk AI drives having warranties of 3 years versus their IronWolf Pro/Exos drives' warranty of 5 years.

The pricing for the Red Pro/Gold per TB versus the Purple is similar; the pricing for the IronWolf Pro/Exos per TB versus the Shyhawk/Skyhawk AI drives are also similar.

I'm just trying to find any real reason to use the surveillance rated drives versus Enterprise drives that come with longer warranties because I'm having difficulty finding any appreciable difference between the types of drives. But again, I can't find many benchmarks or documentation beyond what Seagate and Western Digital include in their marketing, which is vague at best and doesn't leave me with any more of an idea than when I began. Can the write throughput of Enterprise or NAS drives really be fully saturated enough to warrant purchasing a drive with a significantly shorter warranty?

I hope this is not too niche of a question or that it comes across the wrong way. I genuinely just am trying to find out what difference/advantage there really is to using these 'special' drives beyond what is included in marketing.

Edit: Spelling from IronWold to IronWolf
 
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virtuguy

New Member
Dec 12, 2019
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The NVR drives are usually optimized for running continuous write operations. you don't need a great bandwidth either, a current 4k h.265 camera writes only at 0.5mb/sec.

Otherwise these drives are often equipped with much less cache and run only at 5400 rpm. however, the disks are also much cooler and more power efficient => this is also urgently necessary for various nvr devices. If power usage and temperature doesn´t matter => there is no problem running your nvr with nas/enterprise disks.