High-Capacity Hard Drives Built With Surveillance In Mind
Even though the surveillance storage market would appear to have a very narrow focus, both WD and Seagate made interesting design choices that match their vision of the market.
With WD, you have the Purple line of surveillance-oriented hard drives that are optimized for simultaneous read/write performance. Looking at our performance results, workloads that stress the Purple up to a certain point are handled with great responsiveness. This is largely thanks to the company's AllFrame technology, which streamlines performance based off of a known workload. Once you exceed the drive's performance boundaries, less ideal results start cropping up. One big advantage favoring the Purple, however, is power consumption. It draws one-third less power than the Surveillance HDD.
Seagate, on the other hand, is going after pure write-intensive applications with its Surveillance HDD. In our transfer rate test, the Seagate disk is 15-20% faster than WD's Purple. And when you stress the Surveillance HDD, it responds more gracefully, kicking back fewer outliers. Seagate also wins points for including RV sensors that enable RAID arrays of up to 16 drives in a single system. As a result, the Surveillance HDD is more scalable than the Purple.
Overall, deciding between the Purple and the Surveillance HDD comes down to your application. With fewer than eight drives, under a known read/write workload, the WD Purple stands out. Going beyond eight drives with a write-only workload definitely favors the Seagate Surveillance HDD. In both cases, the two drives offer great surveillance performance, exceeding what you'd see from mainstream desktop drives, while selling for far less than their enterprise-class siblings.
Are there any demonstrable effects on performance of having these drives in a small external raid array (of perhaps 4 drives)?
If you're going to wander into the USD1/GB+ territory, even just for informational purposes, please include an SSD in this mix to be fair. SSD performance/price just might validate people buying them for surveillance drives.
Thank you.
Indeed, or any typical Enterprise SATA model (Hitachi HUS, Seagate ES2/NS, etc.)
Come to think of it, given the consequences of not being able to identify a suspect or
obtain other relevant visual information due to dropped data, as AndrewJacksonZA
says it would be interesting to know how these drives compare to various high-capacity
SSHDs/SSDs, eg. the Seagate 4TB ST4000DX001, Samsung 840 EVO 1TB (which includes
AES), and (high-density option, power saving) the Samsung MZ-MTE1T0BW 1TB mSATA.
The higher cost/GB of these products is surely more than worth it given the intended task.
Ian.
Article idea: No offence to the writers at Tom's but this is the first interesting article I have read in a long time. Could we get some more articles like this? Maybe some articles comparing onboard Intel RAID with different popular card options? Or comparing how different drives perform in different RAID configurations and workloads? I get the feeling that these drives would perform quite differently as they are really made to work as a team rather than as solo drives.
Most of the time though, surveillance recordings are merely a nice convenience in case something goes wrong but are not considered critical outside of casinos, banks and few other (very) high security applications that have their own IT departments or dedicated vendors working on their video archival needs and are unlikely to take their hardware recommendations from enthusiast sites like THG.
I doubt any normal company would waste SSDs or 10k/12k/15k RPM HDDs on video surveillance storage. They would be more likely to use standard HDDs like WD Black / Red / Green / Blue.
I really debated on whether to include SSDs in the evaluation. The problem is that because of $/GB and write endurance, it would only make sense to use them on a smaller scale setup, which is where their benefits (simultaneous high speed IO), are greatly reduced. Also, their performance would skew the graphs to the point where it would be hard to interpret the results of the HDDs.