I'm trying to wrap my mind around the issue of high-write cycles and hard drives. I've read the IPVM articles "WD Purple and Seagate Surveillance Hard Drives" and "Favorite Hard Drives for Surveillance", but I'm still unclear of which hard drive is the best for video if money is no object?
More specifically, if performance and reliability were the only criteria, which hard drives would prevail? The video specific models or the enterprise class models? Do you have to choose between performance and reliability, or is one drive superior in both departments?
I found this chart on the Seagate web site that compares their three levels and it surprised me to see that the Enterprise max sustained data rate did not exceed the surveillance drives. So other than 2 more years of warranty & a better reliability rate, do the Enterprise class drives bring anything else to the table? Are surveillance drives actually better than Enterprise drives because they are specifically geared towards video, or is that just marketing mumbo-jumbo?
If I may bring price into the discussion for a moment, for ~$75 more (4TB models), why is a Seagate Constallation ES drive not faster than it's cheaper SV35 sibling, especially since the SV35 is only 5900 rpm?