Subscriber Discussion

Anyone Installing 8TB HDD For Video Surveillance?

UM
Undisclosed Manufacturer #1
Jul 08, 2017

Hello is there anyone installing 6TB or 8TB HDD for surveillance like WD purple series? How is the working stability with Hik and Dahua DVR etc? And any heat burnt problem?

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John Bazyk
Jul 08, 2017
Command Corporation • IPVMU Certified

We've just started using 6TB in the servers we started building. I haven't noticed any heat issues, however our tower servers have a little better airflow than a DVR. I can get them on Amazon for under $200 so it's worth buying one and trying. If it doesn't work throw it in your own computer. Everyone can always use extra storage. 

TH
Tom Hutchison
Jul 08, 2017

I have been installing 6TB in Dell Tower Servers and they do get hot.

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Christopher Freeman
Jul 08, 2017

I recently installed a Dell Server which came with the mini drives , since we upgrade all servers in house ,we did not realize the impact of the mini drives and the fact that you cannot get larger size drives . 

the max was 600 gigabyte , so this became an issue  

so we kept this one for demos 

Very important with dell to really review the specs due to compatibility issues with other products 

We ended up purchasing 6 of the mini drives to get the 3 tbyte hard drive and raid application we needed. 

The server came with no support , which is another real big issue. 

you have to purchase that separately.

really big Issue 

other issue is we had to disable a lot of features , which is a big waste of server . 

Buying a super great engine and taking out all the power and using 4 cats and converters or restrictions , is how this feels when using servers . 

or drumming down the system to work with the software. 

 

 

 

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Christopher Freeman
Jul 08, 2017

The Real Question is Compatibility of 4,6,8 terabyte Hard-drives with existing systems 

New installs you can figure the design criteria into the system requirements 

Some software does not support the upgrades to bigger hard-drives ?

How about when installing replacement upgrades ?

can you install any hard-drive ? or mix match them. 

and since everyone is an expert on line ,

can you install 5400 or 7200 or both ?

and can you mix match with existing ?

or do you upgrade all at the same time.

Do they run at the same recording speed or at different speeds ? 

So who has completed these type of upgrades where compatibility issues play an important part to the upgrade. 

Then there is Type?           Red, Purple, Green standard 

or Company WD, Seagate, ?  

These issues are the real meat of the question. 

This used to be an easy one to answer, but with so many new types on the market and so many experts selling their product lines ,

which one is the CCTV , Surveillance market drives 

Which answer can you answer ? 

TY

 

 

 

 

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Mike Rose
Jul 09, 2017

Pretty much on your own if you are configuring your own hardware 

Have been in situations where supposedly the same pc with the same configuration runs software differently 

everything we use is pre-tested 

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Jared Beagley
Jul 10, 2017
Seagate Technology

"can you install any hard-drive ? or mix match them"
"can you install any hard-drive ? or mix match them"
"and can you mix match with existing ?"
"or do you upgrade all at the same time."
"Then there is Type? Red, Purple, Green standard"
"This used to be an easy one to answer, but with so many new types on the market and so many experts selling their product lines, which one is the CCTV , Surveillance market drives"
"or Company WD, Seagate, ?"

As far as spinning hard drives go, if their interface matches, you can install them. For example, we currently have 3 main drive types broken down by the use they were engineered for:

BarraCuda: These drives are meant for your standard PC and Gaming users. They are rated for 8 hours a day x 5 days a week use and 55TB of data per year, unless you go to the BarraCuda Pro versions. Note: We also offer an SSHD hybrid drive in this category called FireCuda which combines a small SSD cache for your most frequently used storage to load faster, then a spinning disk capacity as well.

IronWolf: These drives are meant for NAS use. They are rated for 24x7 use, 180TB per year workload rating. They do really well in cloud-storage solutions and with multi-user access, especially in balanced read-write applications. The workload rating and warranty are higher in the Pro versions. They also (in sizes 4TB and over for standard, in all Pro versions) have RV (Rotational Vibration) sensors and all have firmware designed to account for high vibrations common in servers and NAS enclosures to protect drive performance and longevity.

SkyHawk: These are our surveillance drives. This is our offering ideal for CCTV. They, like IronWolf, are rated for 24x7 use and have an 180TB workload rating. They differ in that their ideal environment looks something more skewed to the writing side of operations than the read side, something like writing about 90% of the time and reading the other 10%. This is because their firmware is designed to manage and prioritize massive write blocks to protect the quality of video data as it is written to the disk.

All 3 drives are SATA connected. All 3 drives could be plugged into the same system. It's more that, depending on how that system is being used, one simply may work better for it and last longer than another.

Here is a short video on choosing the right drive for the right application if you'd like further info on the topic.

As far as the mixing and matching questions go, you can technically mix and match existing and/or new drives so long as the interface remains the same. If 2 drives are both SATA, you can RAID them together for example. The part where it gets a little tricky is determining not so much when you CAN, but when you SHOULD, and this matters a lot for upgrade paths too. When you mix hard drives in a perfect world, all your drives should be the same drives. This way all of their major spec information is identical. However, we do not live in a perfect world. Typically, when you do things like RAID hard drives, the collective performance of the storage pool is bogged down by the slower components. For example, if you RAID together a 5,400 RPM drive and a 7,200 RPM drive, your speeds are going to be bogged down by the 5,400 RPM drive. Same goes for other specifications of the drives, even if you technically can match them up, the overall speed will have the slower one(s) holding back the faster ones.

This matters with your "when to upgrade" question as well, and is a decision that only you can determine what's right for your budget and needs because, let's say you have an ideal storage capacity in mind, you're looking to upgrade drives from 5,400 to 7,200. You have to decide if you want to invest in one 7,200 RPM drive at a time, knowing that your faster new drive will be slowed in the storage pool by the slower existing ones, or is it worth it to you to upgrade all to 7,200 RPM at once so that you don't have anything 5,400 rpm holding the new drives back.

There are also some potential benefits to be considered from mixing and matching different drives. Some users feel that choosing different drives is a way of protecting themselves from a bad batch of drives and/or a flaw in any single model. Some even prefer mixing different manufacturers' drives for similar reasons. It's kind of a "Put all your eggs in different baskets to prevent yourself from getting burned" approach. Others feel that the best way to prevent any drive from slowing down the system and the capabilities of the other drives is to just buy all of the same drives. You'll find varying anecdotal commentary on this across forums.

We hope this has helped to answer some of your questions.

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Mike Rose
Jul 08, 2017

We have been shipping 8tb drives for some time now with no ill effects. We do pre test components we use and test them in complete products because we warranty the units for 3 years. 

Just recently certified 10tb drives, but found they are still not cost effective enough to replace 8tb drives. Price will come down 

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JH
John Honovich
Jul 09, 2017
IPVM
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JH
Jay Hobdy
Jul 09, 2017
IPVMU Certified

We have been using 6TB in Dahua NVR's w/o issue. We have not checked for heat though. Usually we buy WD purple but recently started letting the distributor put the drive in before the NVR ships and they use Seagate.

 

 

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Blake Murphy
Jul 10, 2017

We have used a few 6TB in NVR's & had no issues.
A couple of installs with 8TB where number of days recording was crucial.
So far no issues with either size but not using Hik or Dahua

We are also testing a Seagate nighthawk 6tb drive in an NVR in our office to see if we can fault that, it is loaded quite heavily & is circulating it's recording every few days. No issues yet.

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Ty Gruner
Jul 10, 2017
Seagate Technology

Super glad to see Seagate getting more mentions in the IPVM threads! Blake, thanks for checking out our Skyhawk drives, you won't be disappointed! If you have any questions or need support with your testing, let us know.  

As there are a few discussions related to HDDs I wanted to highlight that for North America, we have a full team of SEAGATE sales people focused specifically on surveillance as well as a technical pre-sales engineer and a national network of technical engineers engaging with customers on qualifications, technical escalations etc... 

We are always here to help, feel free to reach out.

PS: I work for Seagate ;-)

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BW
Brendon Welch
Jul 20, 2017

Tyrone,

 

I have continued to test the Skyhawk 6, 8 and 10TB drives in our products after repeated overheating issues with WD drives.  On average I find the skyhawk drives to operate at 40-50C under max load, 16 channels @ 4K 15FPS.  I have tested in our smallest .5U casings and 2U tooling.

Recently, one of our product lines completely switch from WD to Seagate, and we have noticed a decrease in our RMA's related to HDD failure.

 

I work for Q-See

 

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BW
Brendon Welch
Jul 20, 2017

I forgot to mention, noticeably quicker access times to playback footage.  

 

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Ty Gruner
Jul 20, 2017
Seagate Technology

That is really great to hear Brendon - we appreciate the support and very happy that you have seen positive results and decided to switch to Seagate. Always awesome when we can add value to your business and improve the customer experience.

I know Anik enjoys working with you on the technical side too so really awesome to see those efforts yielding results.

More good stuff to come!

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RS
Robert Shih
Jul 20, 2017
Independent

Hey Ty! Happy to be working with you guys now on our drives!

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AM
Andrew Montgomery
Jul 10, 2017
IPVMU Certified

We have been using a ton of the 8TB Seagate Skyhawk drives in DVRs for the past year without any issues. Prior to that we were putting in a lot of WD purple 6TB drives, again without any issues.

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Christopher Freeman
Jul 10, 2017

This All Sound s Great , But When I Ask HV, and EV about thier units they give spec's on them and the answers you give dont line up with what they say. 

1. use only certain specified Drives( as specified to thier equipment size 

2. using mix match or different types together only create s software problems for later troubleshooting. 

3. Some of thier units they limit to 4 Tb , or 6 tb drives 

Not always specific to brand so much as size. 

please clarify statements listed above to manufacturers recommendations per unit. specifications. 

I do see so many new  6,8, 10 tb drives on the market and that is why i listed the ? s in the way I did. 

Not so  as to direct at a company , but to get to the details of Why?

If I have existing systems using 2-4 tb drives , what will the problems be in changing them to 6-10 tb drives ? 

as an integrator, the worst time to figure out something is wrong is in the installation process. 

Lots of wasted time and Trial and error discovery's

 

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Christopher Freeman
Jul 10, 2017

Hikvision, the world’s leading supplier of innovative video surveillance products and solutions, releases its new NVR (DS-9600NI-I8) capable of supporting 8TB hard disks. It delivers safe and stable storage over long periods of time, powerful decoding performance, and excellent compatibility. This is good news for systems integrators, having various extended applications and flexible solution designs. At the same time, end-users will benefit from stable storage.

 

It’s simple to support 8TB hard disks – you just need to upgrade the firmware. Later this year it will also support the latest version of NVR – the 4.0, which includes a totally new GUI and more smart features.

 

Armed with Hikvision’s unique H.265+ compression codec and 8 SATA storage capability, the NVR provides a longer-term storage solution. For example, 32ch 2MP IPC with H.265+ compression can support more than 90 days recording. The NVR supports RAID0/1/5/6, and has up to 8TB capacity for each HDD.

 

Dual NICs provides two isolated network interfaces, which makes it possible for end-users to deploy LAN & WAN surveillance according to their demands. They can also get a better remote live viewing/playback experience with dual stream recording, zero-channel live viewing and transcoding functions.

 

“The NVR can be used in multiple applications “, says a Hikvision Product Manager. “In fact it’s recommended for any general security system which needs effective and safe storage.”
 
this is on newer units , and some older units wont support  the upgrades. 
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RS
Robert Shih
Jul 21, 2017
Independent

...I don't think we're supposed to give a full on sales pitch here... That and he only asked whether or not the drives of that size were compatible.

It's a simple yes or no question.

 

Edit: Now that I read a few more of your posts...this must have been a copy paste from somewhere.

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Jon Dillabaugh
Jul 11, 2017
Pro Focus LLC

We have been installing the 6TB Skyhawks in the 7700 line of Hikvision NVRs and have not seen any issues. Hikvision does not mention 8TB support yet.

UI
Undisclosed Integrator #2
Jul 11, 2017

We have been using 8TB drives for a while. We purchase most of NVRs from Dell so we don't have complete control over the drive the Dell installs. But we are able to specify the speed and interface of the drive. All of the 8TB drives I have sold have been in a RAID 5, sometimes RAID 10.

We are still concerned with the throughput of the system. How fast can you write to that drive? When we have customers that have a short video retention period, we find that the 8TB drives aren't fast enough to write the video collected. 

Being able to fit 60 drives into a 4U chassis and get +/- 320TB of useable storage space with RAID 6 and hot spares has been a big help. 

 

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Kevin Bennett
Jul 11, 2017

Are you using a discrete (separate) RAID controller with cache? Dell offers some of their PERC controllers with a 2GB cache.

Some controllers do not have a cache, or have limited cached, and can be a bottleneck for I/O.

UI
Undisclosed Integrator #2
Jul 17, 2017

Kevin, I agree with what you have to say.

My original point was that doubling the size of the disks doesn't mean that you can double the number of cameras. You need to understand the limitations of the components being installed and make sure those limitations are taken into account.

When we build the R720/730/740XDs, we are typically using the H730 PERC controller a 2GB cache. We haven't run into any problems but we are aware that there is a limitation to how many cameras can record to the array. We don't push against the 300MB bandwidth limit that most windows boxes have. Just because you can put 80TB of useable space (12 8TB drives in a RAID 6) doesn't mean that you can put a huge number of cameras. The Axis new Q3709-PVE, (3) 4K sensors in a single housing with a single network connection, can generate 50Mb/s. Put 10 of them onto a single recorder and you may have problems. 

 

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Kevin Bennett
Jul 11, 2017

I have a couple of NVRs (Dell PowerEdge R730xd) running ten (10) 6TB drives in RAID 5 with no problems.  Not sure of the drive manufacturer - I purchase directly from Dell, so it is whatever they are installing that week.  The additional storage space on the NVRs is nice to have.  We were previously using 4TB drives.

UM
Undisclosed Manufacturer #3
Jul 19, 2017

Hey Kevin, do you know what brand/model hard drives Dell are putting in their servers these days ?

U
Undisclosed #4
Jul 19, 2017

I'm using 4TB drives.  I'd like to go with greater capacity but I'm hesitant due to the time it takes to rebuild even a 4TB drive, let alone a 6/8/10TB drive.  If there is physical drive space I'm more conservative and go with 2TB or 4TB drives.  If a rebuild failure was not of concern (such as a test system at my home) I'd try out fewer drives with more capacity.

SC
Sean Chang
Jul 20, 2017
Rasilient Systems

We have been shipping Seagate 8TB drives for large projects. We don't see any problems. We have also qualified 10TB drive.

The issue with large capacity drive is the RAID rebuild time. It could take a week to build. All data will be gone if the second drive failure during this window for RAID5. Consider RAID6 or storage controller has technologies to deal with long rebuild window.

RS
Robert Shih
Jul 20, 2017
Independent

Um....I've got 10TB WD Golds tossed into a Dahua EVS unit so...I don't see how there are any...limitations?

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Christopher Freeman
Jul 21, 2017

When I ask the Question , I just care about results

Not Sales 

Products that perform and Compatibility ( reverse, forward ) 

I know you all have sales in mind , but I need answers , not products 

I have been using, changing, upgrading for years and i see that the industry does not always allow for Forward, Backwards Compatibility 

That's why the question. 

Legacy with out having to change the whole system out after design has set up budgets for min. change , not whole replacement due to compatibility issues. 

 

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