Surveillance Drives

I need a decent 4TB (or maybe more) drive for a security camera set-up. Several brands of surveillance drives available with differing levels of recommendations. There is a lot of discussion about CMR and SMR with CMR being much better for continous writing.

I narrowed it down to 3bramds: WD, Seagate, Toshiba and then down to WD Purple & Seagate Skyhawk.

Does anyone have any direct experience of the WD and Seagate ranges?

I have had eight 12TB Seagate IronWolf Pro 3.5" drives running in my NAS for the last 2.5 nearly 4 years. They run 24/7.

They have been very good so far, quiet and fast. I would recommend them

Edit - time flies, I bought them in late-2017 (from Ebuyer) and got them running in the NAS a few months later.

Previously in a baby NAS, from around 2015/16, I ran four 2.5" WD Red 1TB NASware 3.0 drives - they were pretty good too - but the big Seagate's are in a whole other territory.

Edited by Pheasant (Wed 24-Nov-21 11:36:11)

Thanks,

I am leaning towards Seagate. Their Skyhawk and IronWolf apper to be built to the same exacting standards and are comparable in price - just one is optimised for NAS and the other for surveillance based on the need for read/write or mainly write. Similarly with WD - Purple and Red.

Just need to find a decent deal ... for Seagate.

Yeh I just had a look the drives I bought were £349 in late-2017 and they are now £369.

Just need to calculate what I need ... max 5 or 6 cameras, mix of HD and 4MP (not4k). 30 days will be overkill ... So may wellbe 4TB or 6TB and they are about £88 or £145. The 16TB Skyhawk are £445 !

SMR are supposed to be slower as well, not sure if that would make much of a difference with surveillance,, it is a cheap way of getting more data into less space.

I use N300 Toshiba drives in my NAS, they are CMR, which is why I got them, they can be a bit noisy, but seems to work ok. But I do wonder how much difference it makes between CMR and SMR for people like myself to be honest.

Surveillance drives are more geared to writing than reading, so I have read.

I have two 6TB drives in my Nas in raid 1, I will get another two next year for the other two bays on the unit, no doubt be Toshiba ones again, the prices are good, and they seem to work well and are CMR.

Looks like the WD Red Pro's are on offer via Box here @ £78.74 for 4TB

https://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/wd-4tb-red-plus-cmr...