Seagate SkyHawk 1TB HDD vs WD Green 1TB SSD for CCTV DVR

bizzehdee · March 25, 2023

Hi,

I have a CCTV DVR box right now and it came with a Seagate SkyHawk 1TB HDD built into it (specific Surveillance 24x7 HDD), it currently has 6 cameras writing 1080p video to it, 27/7. When i want to review something from any of the cameras, the seeking around the video is absolutely horrible, both over the network and directly on the device.

Would i see any benefit from replacing the HDD with an SSD? and a regular cheapo no-dram cache SSD at that, which as the WD Green Gen4 which is at a similar price point to the drives that are supplied in these CCTV DVRs.

Would the WD SSD be able to hold up to being written to 27/7, would it be expected to last a reasonably expected timeline for any given SSD (5 years?) ? Would the SSD improve seek times in when playing back the streams, while the drive is stil actively being written to? Would there be any downsides to switching out the HDD for an SSD?

DrMacintosh · March 25, 2023

An SSD is probably one of the worst options for CCTV systems. SSDs really do not want to be writing any amount of data constantly. Surveillance HDDs are the only thing you should be using in this workload.

Electronics Wizardy · March 25, 2023

How many GB a day are you writing to the hdd? You get some issues with drive endurance.

I wouldn't get a super low end drive like a wd green as the write speeds on those are pretty awful, possible worse than the hdd you have now.

Try pausing the recording of the cameras, if the performance issue is fixed, then a faster drive should help. Could also be limited by the processor inside the box though

mariushm · March 25, 2023

A SSD could work, but one of those enterprise ones with petabytes of endurance.

1080p .. let's say 4-5 mbps or around half a megabyte per second, that's 30 MB per minute, 2 GB per hour, 48 GB per day per camera... 6 cameras x 48 GB = 300 GB day.

Samsung PM893 3.84 TB drive ( $320 here: https://www.ebay.com/itm/284390097507 ) is rated for 7008 TB so you could write 500 GB a day for 15000 days or 41 years, in theory.

Even the 960 GB version - $150 here, new, factory sealed : https://www.ebay.com/itm/334512779947 - is rated for 1752 TB .. that's 3500 days or nearly 10 years with 500 GB writes daily.

Anyway... the Green series is not particularly optimized for seek times so it's normal it's seeking like crazy and giving poor performance when reading and writing at same time. Drives with big caches (128-256 MB) may help a bit but not much.

If you want to stay with mechanical drives, maybe see WD Purple or a NAS grade drive, but CMR based (WD Red Plus for example)

bizzehdee · March 25, 2023

So in short, dont use a cheap SSD, and just deal with the stuttery seeking for now, because its not worth £150 for an enterprise or NAS grade SSD for a simple home cctv system?

mariushm · March 25, 2023

5 minutes ago, bizzehdee said:

So in short, dont use a cheap SSD, and just deal with the stuttery seeking for now, because its not worth £150 for an enterprise or NAS grade SSD for a simple home cctv system?

Up to you.

It's like insurance ... how happy will you be that you spent 150 dollars when someone breaks into your house or something happens and you need the recording?

$150 divided by 5 years, divided by 12 months = $2.5 a month.

Another note... I personally wouldn't use a hard drive for something this important for longer than its warranty, and periodically check the SMART info even then... I think the WD Green is warrantied for 2 years, and other cheap drives are also rated 2-3 years.