Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Need external storage suggestions for a video system

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

    Need external storage suggestions for a video system

    Backstory: a little over a year ago, I built out a video surveillance system to handle 32 cameras - 4 analog, and 28 megapixel IP cameras.

    I initially put a single 2tb drive in the system to record video, but that wasn't quite enough retention for what we were trying to do. So, we opted to go with a Buffalo DriveStation Quad, 8tb enclosure. The unit came with (4) Seagate 2tb drives.

    Long story short; Thursday, one of the 4 drives died. Of course, the unit is outside of the 1 year warranty, and the drives can't be RMA'd direct through Seagate.

    At this point, I have 2 options - replace all the drives in the unit with new, or replace the entire unit with something new (and under warranty).

    While the Buffalo unit has performed relatively well, I will say a few things. The temperature controlled fan SUCKS. It obviously doesn't take drive temp into account, but rather just temp at the controller board or the fan itself. Drive SMART status shows a peak temp on all 4 drives at 65-70*C. No doubt, this contributed to the demise of the drive (also why I'm not planning on replacing just the failed drive). Also, I can't guarantee that any newer drive will work with it anyway.

    So, what are your suggestions? I'm looking for room for 4 drives. Ship with drives or not... if not, will need to buy drives (preferred WD AV drives, which would be $500 alone); and my budget is relatively low ($600-800).

    Any ideas would be great.

    Thanks!
    Ludicrous gibs!


    #2
    Re: Need external storage suggestions for a video system

    So, I think I've decided on rolling my own. I have an enclosure and multiplex SATA card picked out, just need to decide on drives. My preference is with Western Digital, but I'm not seeing a good fit.

    AV-GP - Designed for AV and surveillance recording (good); not designed for RAID (bad)

    Red - Designed for NAS (good); reports of high DOA rate (bad)

    RE4 - Designed for RAID, and get better reliability reviews (good); twice as expensive as the others (bad)

    My problem is, I need to build some redundancy into the system. Since it's too much data to back up nightly, being able to have some protection from a single drive failure would be nice. I plan on putting the drives in RAID5, whereas my last enclosure was just striped to get the total capacity of the drives.
    Ludicrous gibs!

    Comment


      #3
      Re: Need external storage suggestions for a video system

      Unless you're doing hardware raid, I don't think it really matters that the AV series lack some raid features. They will work fine in regular raid.

      There's some 3 TB Toshiba drives on newegg now for 149$ .. hitachi made: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822149396
      I can't say anything about the reliability though.

      There's also some 2TB WD supposedly optimized for video surveillance, storing etc at 109$: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136783

      imho... don't pay double for re4 drives, just get twice the number of hard drives and do a rsync style backup (incremental backups, only differences etc) to another computer if you're really worried about losing data.
      Last edited by mariushm; 05-22-2013, 08:02 AM.

      Comment


        #4
        Re: Need external storage suggestions for a video system

        I was looking at the 3tb EURS drives - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136926

        I'm worried about reviews such as this - "I am using this in a RAID1 set right next to other brands of 3TB drives also in RAID1 sets. This thing is a dog. It takes 5x to 10x longer to sync the RAID1 as with other competing drives. SMART reads often fail due to timeout while the disk is in use."

        In a RAID 5, that wouldn't be good at all.

        Of course, as soon as you choose RAID as an option in the WD drive configuration wizard, it points you straight to the RE4's.
        Ludicrous gibs!

        Comment


          #5
          Re: Need external storage suggestions for a video system

          Is it true hardware RAID? If so, then yes, do the REs or other TLER capable drives otherwise you're going to have a bad time.


          Personally, I rolled my own using Openmediavault, which uses Linux Software RAID and 4 WD Reds. So far it's performing very well.

          Out of curiosity, which video software are you using? I was using Zoneminder, but switched to Blue Iris
          Last edited by smason; 05-22-2013, 05:14 PM.
          36 Monitors, 3 TVs, 4 Laptops, 1 motherboard, 1 Printer, 1 iMac, 2 hard drive docks and one IP Phone repaired so far....

          Comment


            #6
            Re: Need external storage suggestions for a video system

            I was planning on hardware RAID. We're running Geovision cameras with the Geovision recording software that comes with them. 32 total channels available, though we're not using all of them.
            Ludicrous gibs!

            Comment


              #7
              Re: Need external storage suggestions for a video system

              Sounds like to me you would be better off with a Data server vs external storage for the money you can get much larger storage running another computer than buying flat out external storage array's.

              Comment

              Working...
              X