Continuous writing and deleting of large files to external hard drive?

[Mojavehigh]

I have a NetGear router with ReadyNAS and have attached a WD External HDD as an NAS drive. I am using the HDD primarily as storage for 5 IP cams around my property.

Each camera writes a roughly 160MB video file every 10 minutes and deletes the oldest file in its folder. I do very little reading of the videos.

How much wear and tear is this putting on the HDD? It is doing very little seeking, so I assume that means less mechanical wear, but it is continually writing and deleting large files, so does that mean a lot more disk wear?

I can't quite wrap my head around how this compares with normal usage of a desktop PC's hard drive.

Thanks!

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there Mojavehigh,

Well, that is a good amount of data written.
I don't think that anyone would be able to give you a specific answer to how much wear and tear is this putting on the HDD or on how long would the drive last. Generally speaking, a drive that is constantly wiring data would fail faster than a drive that is being accessed from time to time.

My suggestion would be to take a look at some surveillance drives. They have different firmware than the regular usage ones and are designed to be used 24/7 in surveillance systems. In WD's case, as I can't really comment on the other brands, this is WD Purple: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=C90lkr

Let me know in case you have some more questions,
D_Know_WD

 

[USAFRet]

This is no different than the drive in a Tivo, or your cable company DVR box, or a self contained 4/8 camera system.

Should last years. But as with any other drive, it might fail tomorrow.
As noted above, there are specific models designed for this use.