Surveillance Hard Drive Advantage

SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) Hard Drive vs Traditional Hard Drive

Surveillance Hard Drive Advantage

Introduction

The ability to record video surveillance footage and playback at a later time is a key feature in any video surveillance system. In the past, this was accomplished by using a video tape recorder and storing the recording on cassette tapes. Today, most security systems have switched over to storing the information digitally on a hard drive.

Hard Disk Drives (abrv. HDD) are a critical component is any video surveillance system. Without an HDD, only a live view of the security cameras is possible. A hard drive must be installed, formatted, and initialized by the NVR in order for it to record footage. Sometimes multiple HDDs are installed to increase total capacity and playback time.

Types of Hard Drives

In today’s market, there are many types of hard drives available. These range from cheap, consumer drives for laptops, to professional enterprise HDDs for large data centers. The more expensive hard drives may have higher storage capacity, faster read/write performance, or long mean-time between failure.

A consumer drive is designed with light-medium daily use, and not intended to function 24/7. Usually it will have slightly reduced performance, or may struggle with heavy read/write tasks. A professional grade HDD will be designed to operate 24/7 under medium-heavy load, and will not have much difficulty keeping up with a heavy workload.

Western Digital Surveillance HDD
A Western Digital Purple 6TB HDD

Surveillance Hard Drives

Designed with security systems in mind, a surveillance grade hard drive is engineered to withstand a 24/7 heavy workload. With up to 128 cameras running in a system, a regular hard drive will struggle to keep up with the constant writing to the disk. You can expect a consumer grade HDD to wear out well within 2 years in such an environment, leading to extra costs of replacing the failed drive.

With a surveillance drive, you can be assured of reliable performance in any video surveillance system. By choosing the best HDD upfront, you will save money in the long run by avoiding having to frequently replace the HDD. Additionally, a failed HDD could spell disaster for a business if an incident occurs and no footage can be retrieved.

GS Global Security

At GS Global Security, we only use Western Digital Purple hard drives inside our NVRs and DVRs. We also offer a 3-year limited warranty with each hard drive. We offer 1TB/2TB/4TB/6TB/8TB/10TB capacity drives, just specify to your account manager when you place your order.