Hard Drives

[Stuart 0]

Are there any difference between an internal hard drive that can be obtained from Staples and one from a CCTV store? Does it have to be a CCTV type of harddrive or does it matter?

[scorpion 0]

Yes, and no.

 

A CCTV store may have heavy duty drives designed for 24/7 use. Staples is probably going to have entry level quick sale HD. Then again I do not see staples selling hard drives. Would this be a hard drive inside of a product that is sold at Staples?

 

I use Western Digital Caviar HD for AVTech AVC 760, and other DVRs.

 

I have never had a problem. Knock! Knock! On wood.

 

I would ask what is your budget? Can you afford to spend more? Is it worth it in your case to spend more? I would rather see someone downgrade, and then turn around and buy the best UPS battery backup money can buy to protect an entry level DVR.

 

We would have to have model and manufacture info to truley answer your question.

 

Yes it does matter. Only for operational success, and longevity, otherwise you can use a regular hard drive although it may not be recommended.

 

 

You should follow your manual, or manufacture quide lines!

[Stuart 0]

Thanks, my confusion is that staples actually lists and sells some of the hard drives that are recommended in my owners manual. Yet, I assumed that the make and model might have some unique differences. I have a 80 gig now but want to upgrade to around 200 so I can have at least 2 weeks before overright began on my 4 channel CPCAM 503 DVR

[survtech 0]

Where you buy drives would have nothing to do with their performance. If Staples sells drives that your DVR manufacturer recommends, you could buy it from them. You could also buy the drives from many computer stores or online.

[CCTV_Suppliers 0]

Are there any difference between an internal hard drive that can be obtained from Staples and one from a CCTV store? Does it have to be a CCTV type of harddrive or does it matter?

 

Better question is if there are a differences between consumer, commercial or surveillance grade hard drives ? and the answer is YES.

 

In the past, most manufacturers used the cheapest hard drives they could to keep their margins high.. However... Maxtor has done a great job in selling more hard drives than anyone else when they were a separate corporation... The main problem was that their hard drives were not performing well and they did not inform the manufacturers of DVR... This effected everyone that needed such drives for DVR system.. Later they were bought out by Seagate and they shaped the Maxtor's image by having it target only for consumer markets.

 

Both Seagate and Western Digital introduced what they called it "surveillance" grade hard drives that actually performed better than commercial version... and they kept the price points in an acceptable levels, which allowed manufacturers to adhere to these new drives.

 

I can tell you that there are big differences when going from consumer grade to commercial and then surveillance grade. You will not find these surveillance grade drives from your local Office Depot or even an Fryies Electronics... I know that few e-tailers, such as NewEgg and few others do carry them, so you can price compare and get the best value you can find.

 

The only difference between Seagate and Western Digital drives that we see is that Seagate offers five years warranty on these drives vs. three years from Western Digital... this is the main reason why Seagate drives will cost slightly more... but not much more...

 

Our failure rate comparison chart shows that we went from over 18% failure using Maxtor drives to less than 2% failure rate with both Seagate and with WD... Overall performance also was increased due to higher cache level and in some cases up to 32MB...

 

Even though both companies have 1TB drives and even Seagate recently started shipping 1.5TB drives, none of them will survive in the DVR application... these size drives are mainly produced for consumer markets use, which means no more than 8 hours per day usage.....

 

One other notation... Both companies announced few months ago that they will stop producing ATA drives (sometimes are referred as PATA drives)... At the moment you may find them in the market, but starting next year, both companies will stop producing... Which means that the only option available for hard drives is SATA connectivity. So, plan ahead as this technology changes...

 

I am sure other member will jump in and give you these part numbers and I will add more later if needed.

[survtech 0]

Still, you can find suitable hard drives at a number of sources. For instance, the Seagate SV35 drives are specifically designed for video recording applications. They would likely work for most DVR's since they are available in PATA (IDE) and SATA configurations and are available online from newegg.com, amazon.com, B&H Photo/Video and many other etailers. They have 250-, 320-, 500- and 750-GB, and 1-TB capacities.

 

Western Digital also makes drives for Surveillance DVR's, both PATA and SATA type. They are the WD AV series and are available in 80GB to 500GB sizes.

[CCTV_Suppliers 0]

Agreed, except .....

 

Both Seagate and WD stopped producing anything less than 750GB PATA drives over four months ago, so whatever you find in the market is what is left from previous production runs.

 

According to both manufacturers, starting beginning of the next year, they are leaning not to produce any PATA drives period! SATA version drives are what is and will be available commonly.

 

Try to keep away from the Seagate SV35 series... rather go with their DV35 series drives... they operate much cooler and last longer... pricing is basically the same... There are known heat built up issues with SV35 series drives that are being addressed by Seagate... but DV35 series drives work great!

[cachecreekcctv 0]

Most hard drives for DVR's are EIDE. Look at Newegg.com or Tigerdirect.com for either the Seagate, WD, or Maxtor models. Everyone has their own "preference" brand. I have a DVR with 2 Maxtor 200G EIDE models, that has been running 24/7 for over 4 years. Recording constantly. I also "knock on wood". These are "bottom line" drives, nothing "special" about them.

[CCTV_Suppliers 0]

Yup, Maxtor made great drives... until volume of business effected the quality... They were supplying drives to most manufacturers... and all these manufacturers had problems few years back...

 

Lets knock on the wood... but remember, the hard drives are not if they will fail, it is always when they will fail

[survtech 0]

If all else fails, you can try a SATA-to-PATA (SATA-to-IDE) converter:

 

[CCTV_Suppliers 0]

Or and if your system allows it, you can install SATA controller... pricing of which has come down very low $20 range...

[fcaw11 0]

Has anyone tried a SATA to PATA converter on a Dedicated Micros DS2?

[SteveFD 0]

Experience tells me that as PC HDD's and DVR HDD's are so very close in pricing that the only difference is going to be in optimised firmware, power profiles and perhaps cache.

 

Are you going to see any noticable difference? I doubt it.

 

HDD's designed for very low MTBF rate (failure rates) are 2 to 3 times more expensive than your average PC/DVR drive. I suspect that the difference has more to do with marketing segmentation than performance.

 

Going from Maxtor to Segate / WD /Hitachi/IBM and comparing failure rates says more about the respective companies QC at any moment in time rather than are PC HDD's any better than DVR HDD's.

 

In conclusion if data security is a worry go for a server system with a SCSI RAID 5 or 10 array along with a decent back-up system, otherwise a PC HDD with a decent warranty will be fine.

 

Steve