Are Surveillance HDD’s worth the extra cost or is it just a marketing thing?

I’m needing a 2TB drive.

There is an element of truth to some of the claims behind drives being suited for certain purposes more than others.

i.e. drives spinning at slower speeds are going to be slower to wear out (in theory) and be happy to run for longer continuous periods.

Also firmware within a HDD will be tailored to its intended purpose. A good example I read was that a surveillance drive wouldn’t care too much if it wrote data to a slightly dodgy section of the disc and would just carry on writing and no go back to try and fix it – cause all that would be lost would be a few frames of CCTV footage. A desktop drive would care about something like that because it might be an important document file etc etc.

With that in mind, what is your intended purpose? If its just for a desktop PC, then get a desktop drive. Just cause something costs more doesn’t mean its going to be better for your uses.

what for?
CCTV – Yes
NAS – Yes
USB – No
PC Upgrade – No

It for CCTV. I’ll pick up a surveillance drive then.

Thanks for you comments.

This is an interesting read: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/26/wd_purple_seagate_surveillance_hdds_announced/

Sounds plausible if your CCTV has dozens of cameras shooting hi-def footage, pointless if it’s a home installation to keep an eye on your driveway.

good example I read was that a surveillance drive wouldn’t care too much if it wrote data to a slightly dodgy section of the disc and would just carry on writing and no go back to try and fix it – cause all that would be lost would be a few frames of CCTV footage. A desktop drive would care about something like that because it might be an important document file etc etc.

So… you’re paying extra for a drive that’s more crap?

I’m just a single 2MP camera covering the back door to the house and shed.

At most I would only ever add 1 more camera to cover the front door (neighbour has notified us in the past that people have been peering through our front windows).

I’ll weigh up the costs in the new year sales…where’s usually cheapest for stuff like this?

If it’s for a small home camera I’d just get the cheapest disk you can find. My go-tos are usually Amazon or Scan.

So… you’re paying extra for a drive that’s more crap?

Not necessarily … The drive will continually be being passed data to write. If the drive reaches a sector where it knows it hasn’t written the data correctly, then it can either have a low threshold of trying again then ignoring it to carry on, or try many many times to re-write the data again again again. If it goes back and tries again many times, that is time spent not writing data during which it is still receiving more info which it has to buffer and temporarily hold until it manages to sort out the bad sector, and then clear out all the buffer … all this while yet more info is being sent to the drive for writing.

In theory, if a disk gets hung up spending too much time trying to sort out that initial error, then the buffer could fill up to the point that its full, and it simply cant take on any new stuff … so any new information to be written is then lost or causing issues further up the chain. If its a camera pushing out the data to the drive, its not going to care about holding image data from a few seconds before, it only cares about sending out what it sees there and then.

By having a low threshold of ignoring errors, then the drive can just simply move on, and keep its buffer spare and remain available to write new data as it gets it.

You either lose a small frame of data, or seconds worth of footage cause a drive is tying itself in knots.

Its not crap, just a different set of priorities.

By having a low threshold of ignoring errors, then the drive can just simply move on, and keep its buffer spare and remain available to write new data as it gets it.

Couldn’t drive behaviour like this be controllable by the OS?

To an extent. The os can tell the drive to write the data again, but ultimately its down to the drives firmware to decide how to place the write head on the platter and write the data.

The os doesnt control everything in that way, it kinda delegates the tasks. “Oi, hard drive, write this stuff, and only let me know if there is a problem. , cheers”