Which Hard Drive?

[maalna2 0]

I am about to buy a Qvis dvr that does not come with a HD. They recommend a Western Digital Caviar. My question is which color is best to use? I have read Black is best performance but more noise and power consumption. Blue is middle of the road. Green is low performance and power consumption and almost silent while running. All that being said some post say that most people would not be able to tell a difference in the three when install. I just want to get the right one for the dvr.

[coreyman 0]

I am about to buy a Qvis dvr that does not come with a HD. They recommend a Western Digital Caviar. My question is which color is best to use? I have read Black is best performance but more noise and power consumption. Blue is middle of the road. Green is low performance and power consumption and almost silent while running. All that being said some post say that most people would not be able to tell a difference in the three when install. I just want to get the right one for the dvr.

 

 

From experience the blue and the black are very noisy and you can definitely HEAR the difference in a residential setting. You don't need anything super fast for recording the video, go with the green.

[rory 0]

Dahua recommend against using the green brand if at all possible.

[Seedigital 0]

I had a really bad run with the Green HDD's with Western Digital (its pretty widely known that they had firmware issues for a looong time),

I found the Seagate Green Variant a lot better (but they recently scraped their Green initiative).

 

So your kinda stuck for choice, WD or Seagate.

 

WD

Black is awesome but they run a bit hotter (which can be a very bad thing if its in a hot or stagnant environment),

 

Blue is a good compromise

 

Seagate you've got your barracuda line up they are pretty solid, same deal ignore the performance parts due to heat.

 

Seagate do some brilliant single platter drives (which are half the thickness) and run pretty cool and are full speed <-- If you don't need mass storage I think they do a 750Gb single platter which is pretty awesome.

 

In short WD Blue or Seagate Barracuda

[rory 0]

Dahua Recommended HDD list, Oct 14, 2011

http://www.bahamassecurity.com/r/products/dahua/DH-HDD-LIST.pdf

[Seedigital 0]

Also my good friend google reckons there something called Automatic Acoustic Management on seagate drives and the seek sound level can be adjusted using AAM.

 

also known as that clunking sound you sometimes hear when a drive starts its read write arm shifting about, so there you go random tid bit no idea how to set it up but there you go.

[maalna2 0]

I ended up getting a WD black. It is not really loud plus once it gets put away I won't be able to heard it anyway.

[coreyman 0]

I ended up getting a WD black. It is not really loud plus once it gets put away I won't be able to heard it anyway.

 

That's fine if you got it somewhere that can muffle the sound, here at my house we have the DVR on top of some cabinets in the kitchen and you can hear the hard drive spinning when you go to get coffee in the morning, WD Caviar Blue.

 

Some of the Seagate options explained in this post sound like a pretty good alternative.

[Seedigital 0]

I did a bit more research not just limited to Seagate drives!, apparently there is a whole bunch of options I never knew you could do with hdd's

[rory 0]

i put 6x 2B blacks in a 32 channel .. I dont notice the noise, the fan is all I hear

[coreyman 0]

i put 6x 2B blacks in a 32 channel .. I dont notice the noise, the fan is all I hear

 

I guess the DVR isn't 5FT away from your coffee maker at 5AM either?

[rory 0]

I guess the DVR isn't 5FT away from your coffee maker at 5AM either?

to be fair i have a standup fan and a ceiling fan also running almost 24 hours anyway .. and i live 10 feet from a main road ..

[coreyman 0]

I guess the DVR isn't 5FT away from your coffee maker at 5AM either?

to be fair i have a standup fan and a ceiling fan also running almost 24 hours anyway .. and i live 10 feet from a main road ..

 

Ahh ok you are used to the noise, I live out in the country

[tomcctv 190]

That's fine if you got it somewhere that can muffle the sound, here at my house we have the DVR on top of some cabinets in the kitchen and you can hear the hard drive spinning when you go to get coffee in the morning, WD Caviar Blue

 

 

 

it will be down to a bad fitted hard drive. you get this with cheap dvrs or fitted by someone who has not used the H/D fixing kit.

[coreyman 0]

That's fine if you got it somewhere that can muffle the sound, here at my house we have the DVR on top of some cabinets in the kitchen and you can hear the hard drive spinning when you go to get coffee in the morning, WD Caviar Blue

 

 

 

it will be down to a bad fitted hard drive. you get this with cheap dvrs or fitted by someone who has not used the H/D fixing kit.

 

I put the hard drive in it, where do I get this 'HD Fixing Kit' that you speak of? It's not rocket science to install the hard drive, 4 screws and you are done.

 

The installation was much like all the computer towers that I've put together. I know some servers have a tray that the hard drive sits in, but I also have some models of servers that the hard drive screws directly to the chasis(usually in these models there is no room for a HD tray).

[SEANHAWG 1]

Most of the newer hard drives are extremely quiet. other than the occasional click, I dont see how anyone could hear it unless they were right by it.

[danger_e 0]

Sometimes you can get the occasional vibration from a drive when it changes RPMs to write more data. If you hear that kind of sound, try putting some rubber grommets on the HDD screws to "float" the drive so that it's not actually touching any of the metal in the housing. This worked on my home PC, and could help in a standalone DVR if there is room in the mounting bracket.

 

Word of warning, this could also make it louder if there's still some of the housing touching the drive.

[matjaz 0]

problem with Green disks is their energy save funcion with internal fast head spindown , variable spin rate and similiar settings . As such they are good for computer use ( computer can control advanced settings in firmware) but not for DVR or any other UNIX or LINUX based contnius recording of large chunks of data.

 

In other words : if you record room with 1 passing person per 10 minuts using motion detection fuction and your green disk inside DVR park heads (with plate spinup and spindown) on every 5 minutes your disk will be dead in one year.

 

Also manufacturers dont recomand use of green disk in any RAID . Why ? If raid detect spindown of HD he will declare failed drive. Its not so simple, but you got the point.