Surveillance, that's a hot topic right now. We'll make some disk drives for that – WD, Seagate

Not so long ago, Apple went through a list of big cats to name its OS X releases and it seems that WD is doing the same with a box of crayons. So far we’ve had WD Black (flash-disk hybrid), Green (eco-friendly), Blue (desktop-friendly) and Red (NAS-friendly). The spectrum is widening though, as WD announced its Purple range of …

[Anonymous Coward]

"90 per cent write and 10 per cent read"

Umm, I watch what is on my DVR so wouldn't that be 50% write and 50%read? A standard drive won't have an issue with a DVR as most encode at around 6Mbps or so so even with 5 streams, that is only 30Mbps, which is not even close to what the drive is capable of.

These drives would also be good for packet capture devices that just capture and write most of the time. Unless the unit is actively used, there is no reading going on and even when it is in use, writing takes priority. Having the user wait a little longer is no big deal compared to trying to buffer multiple 10Gbps links. Run out of buffer and the data is lost, make the user wait and preserve the data.

[Anonymous Coward]

DVRs are constantly recording on all tuners, so they have way more writes than reads. With my dual tuner Tivo, it is recording 48 hours of video a day. I don't watch 4.8 hours a day so I'm not even up to 10% read and some DVRs have as many as SIX tuners.

[Neil Barnes]

Red (NAS-friendly)

And perhaps, yellow and black diagonal stripes (NSA-friendly)?

[Decade]

Why so negative about Hi-Def?

In my organization, we have a traditional standard-definition DVR, and it's almost completely useless. We haven't blanketed the outside of our building with cameras, so a single camera has to cover a large area.

Multiple times now we've had perps come in and vandalize some part of our property. Then we look at the recording and say, yep, that's them. That blurry block of pixels. The police can't do anything with this information.

My TV has had high definition for a while now. I anticipate high-definition security cameras some day. Eventually.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Why so negative about Hi-Def?

I have a 720p camera myself, its good, but still not quite enough, the big problem is storage, I can only hold about 1Month of video on my NAS, and that isn't even at full high def 30FPS that the camera can handle......

I would definitely recommend getting the highest resolution camera you can if you install security cameras, I know my next one will be, I'm even considering rolling my own, since I can't buy a 10MP 5 FPS security camera, but I can buy a digital camera that can sustain 5fps @ 10 megapixels...

You don't need 30FPS HD video, you need 3-5 fps at 10 Megapixels..

with the fasted man alive covering 10 meters in 1 second, you only need to cover 4 meters for them to be captured in one of those frames at 3FPS, at 5fps you only need to cover 2 meters....

[Tom 13]

If the cameras and drives are there

the market can bloom. A comment I've often heard from my dad is "With the kind of video you can get on a pocket phone these days, why is it that whenever the news shows you a video clip of a criminal suspect, it is always gray and too blurry to see anything?"

And a friend of mine has another friend who runs a liquor store with decent surveillance equipment. He looks for cheap drives because he treats them as WORM drives. No, re-writes, just fills them up, replaces them, notes the dates covered and location and files them. He says about once a quarter the cops show up asking if he might have tape for such and such dates for alleged event y. So he pulls the drive, hands it to them and tells them to bring it back when they're done.

[Anonymous Coward]

"...box of crayons"

Outstanding.

[Mpeler]

Re: "...box of crayons"

Hmmm, with the surveillance/crime angle, maybe "Burnt Hombre" would be appropriate (with apologies to Douglas Adams...).

[YARR]

Sounds like a solution in search of a problem. If writes take priority over reads then the OS controlling the drive ought to handle that, plus buffering the IO to avoid any data loss.

Perhaps what digital surveillance needs is a specialist tuned codec that records movement at near-lossless quality while using maximum compression for stationary backgrounds?

[The Blacksmith]

Seagate ST3000VX000 are rubbish

I have had 8x ST3000VX000 in a raid set writing video camera feeds from 10 or so cameras. We have had both the 9YW166 batch and the 1CU166 batch. They went into production in October 2012. The last of them died today. Seagate refused to believe there was a batch problem, but one by one they have been dying (and replaced under warranty).

The seven 9YW166s died first, and I thought it was only them, but the 1CU166 died today. bringing a sorry end to the experiment.

The drives were mounted on shock absorbing mounts, with dedicated cooling in a specific enclosure, so I can't really put it down to environment. Particularly since the 8 WD30EFRXs in another system similarly built haven't suffered a hiccup ;-)