Surveillance drives for video and photography storage

Guardsmon · 8 Feb 2024 at 10:58

So my WD Red have done me well for many years, but coming to the point where I'm not sure I trust them not to fail soon and I've acquired 3x Toshiba Surveillance S300 10TB drives that in theory would do as nice replacements. I've done some reading and it seems like the only real difference is the level of error checking that happens, but if I've got a pair in RAID 1 that should counteract this to some extent. Currently I'm looking to put them into my QNAP TS-230, but I'm considering building my self a little home server where I'd use all three in RAID5.

My question is has anyone used these drives (or equiv) for a similar use and do you have any suggestions or feedback?

Guardsmon · 9 Feb 2024 at 14:43

5abr3 said:
No direct experience with them but looking at similar surveillance drives one of the key differences to other HDD's is they tend to be optimised for continous write and not bursty write loads or read loads.

Probably more importantly: a reminder that raid 1 with 2 drives will only flag an error, it cannot attempt automatically correct the value. You need 3 drives or more in the array to be able to spot a single drive error and for the drives to "vote" on what's correct. The only edge case on that I guess is if one of the 2 totally dies then there's a majority of one anyway in the vote...

Thanks I was not aware of that, but it makes a lot of sense having a validation drive. So I guess I'd be foolish to use these in RAID 1, but set them up as RAID 5 might be a possibility.

Anyone else had any first hand experience? (Good or bad)

Guardsmon · 15 Feb 2024 at 23:30

Armageus said:
*snip*

Thanks that's very helpful.

I actually just downloaded a version of TrueNAS to try (it was originally going to be a MS Server box, but thought I might mix it up). Have you had much experience with TrueNAS and would it be suitable for these drives in this 'not ideal, but plausible' use case?

Guardsmon · 19 Feb 2024 at 13:58

Thanks for your help all. I think I'll see what I can do about sourcing some proper storage drives for data and use these just for CCTV as they are intended