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[cosmicfx]

Hi

I'm needing to get a larger HDD for my large video collection .. there are Surveillance drives options. From little I've read the difference between these surveillance drives and normal HDD's is that they are obviously optimised for recording video, so apparently writes are good, reads not as good.
So question is, if I used these type surveillance drives for my large video collection, would MC struggle at all opening and managing the database and video for browsing and playback?

TIA
Rob

[mattkhan]

Put the library on an SSD locally, put media on whatever drives are appropriate for your needs

[zybex]

Surveillance drives are optimized for 24/7 continuous writing - the read/write speeds are similar to other drives, it's just that their warranty allows for more than 8h/day operation, which is the norm for consumer drives.

Any regular consumer drive works fine. Buy NAS-grade drives if they're going to be powered for 24/7. Surveillance drives are really not needed. Performance-wise, they're more or less all the same and you won't have performance issues with any of them.

As Mattkhan says, the library (database) itself should be on an SSD/M2 drive for performance.

[cosmicfx]

Thanks for replies. I hear you regarding library.
Just again from what I've read, Surveillance drives are specifically made to priorities writes over reads ... writes 80% reads 20% performance, thus my question here specifically to find out of MC would struggle reading Surveillance drives where the large amount of video files would be kept.

[zybex]

As I said above, read and write performance is similar to non-surveillance drives, and just fine for MC. Not the best choice in general, unless you plan on having some cameras writing to it 24/7.

[Manfred]

A Media Archive is different from Surveillance: If I ripped an BD or DVD I store it, get Movie & TV Info and then it's im principle Read only. So you have much more reads than writes. In the Surveillance  Business you delete the content after a defined period of time and write again and again.
I purchased a 12 TB WD Gold last year. I chatted with WD US Support (very friendly - I also got a coupon - I had already 46 TB WD Red) what is the best large capacity drives for Workstations. For NAS WD Red Series , for Workstation purpose WD Gold 5(Y Warranty). You could shutdown your workstation and it would not harm the disk.

[marko]

Hi

I'm needing to get a larger HDD for my large video collection .. there are Surveillance drives options. From little I've read the difference between these surveillance drives and normal HDD's is that they are obviously optimised for recording video, so apparently writes are good, reads not as good.
So question is, if I used these type surveillance drives for my large video collection, would MC struggle at all opening and managing the database and video for browsing and playback?

TIA
Rob

Hi Rob,
If you're interested, I can offer this 8Tb drive, FOC, you just pay shipping... It's performance rating is "Excellent" . Drive is a shade over eight years old!

Let me know if you're interested

[zybex]

What a bargain, only 0.00000258% bad sectors!!!

FOC

I demand a discount!

[JimH]

Isn't it normal for a new drive to also have some bad sectors?

[zybex]

Yes and no.

New drives have a large pool of extra sectors, hidden and reserved - this is in the order of tens or hundreds of thousands of sectors. When a bad sector is detected the drive automatically assigns one of those sectors as the replacement sector for the bad one, and keeps track of it in an internal mapping table so that any read/write request gets redirected.

When that spare pool is exhausted the drive starts reporting actual bad sectors, as it can no longer hide them. By this point however, the drive is far from being reliable as it has actually been failing for a while, and performance suffers as the heads keep being redirected to some other section of the platter. Bad sectors due to dust or head degradation tend to be contagious to the sectors next to a bad one, so a drive can quickly die after starting to display bad sectors.

SMART can report on the current number of reallocated sectors - this is the value to look for. Any drive with a value larger than zero here is, in my opinion, dangerous and should be replaced.

Edit: On top of this there's the Factory Defect table which is another list of hidden bad sectors detected during manufacture testing. This is usually completely hidden and can only be read with special software provided by the manufacturer. This is called the P-List (Primary defects list); the one above is the G-List (Grown defects list). Nowadays the P-List should be empty for almost all drives, but there's no easy way to tell.

[JimH]

Yes and no.

[cosmicfx]

Hi Rob,
If you're interested, I can offer this 8Tb drive, FOC, you just pay shipping... It's performance rating is "Excellent" . Drive is a shade over eight years old!

Let me know if you're interested

Wahaha that's pretty decent offer there Marko ... if only I didn't live on the other side of the world ... I'm sure'd be special shipping fees for a drive like this

[cosmicfx]

As I said above, read and write performance is similar to non-surveillance drives, and just fine for MC. Not the best choice in general, unless you plan on having some cameras writing to it 24/7.

I ended up just getting a "normal" PC drive ... hadn't bought a HDD in many years, was so surprised to see the new 5200RPM drive read/write 3 to 4 times faster than my old 72000RPM drive ... from what I read online it's got to do with new technology ... density or something like that.
Anyway ... regarding MC database again ... to get clarity ... does it make a big difference whether the MC database is on a HDD 5200RPM drive, versus an NvMe drive? Would one notice any lag or difference as a user?
Just thinking having the database on a HDD would save a whole bunch of write to the NvMe drive which would obviously age it.

[zybex]

Yes, it makes a big difference specially if you have a large collection.

NVMe wear hasn't been an issue for a few generations already as they implement wear-leveling to spread the writes across the entire drive. You can expect 200 TB or more of writes - some Samsung drives have been tested to 1 PB before starting to show issues, there's a webpage somewhere with that test. That's hundreds of GB per day, every single day, for years. It's a non-issue.

[cosmicfx]

Yes, it makes a big difference specially if you have a large collection.

NVMe wear hasn't been an issue for a few generations already as they implement wear-leveling to spread the writes across the entire drive. You can expect 200 TB or more of writes - some Samsung drives have been tested to 1 PB before starting to show issues, there's a webpage somewhere with that test. That's hundreds of GB per day, every single day, for years. It's a non-issue.

Awesome to know, peace of mind, thanks