Surveillance Hard Drives vs. Desktop Hard Drives: What’s the Difference? Can one work in place of the other? How can I tell one from the other?
When it comes to CCTV security systems, often regular desktop hard drives are used in place of surveillance hard drives by installers and owners, either because of ignorance, availability, or cost factors.
While both options can technically be interchanged and still work, they have each been engineered to aptly perform in different specific applications for maximum efficiency and longevity.
Surveillance HDD vs. Desktop HDD
In terms of appearance, functionality, and attachment, surveillance hard drives are identical to PC hard drives; however, the former have features and optimizations made specifically for video surveillance applications like NVR’s, DVRs, Video servers, or any other Video Management System.
Workloads
PC drives are engineered to perform regular and simultaneous read, write, and data transfer tasks, whereas surveillance hard drives are optimized to dedicate about 90% of their resources to writing and the remaining 10% to reading and transferring.
Simply stated, a DVR or NVR receives continuous footage via cameras connected to it, compresses it, and writes it to the attached hard drive for about 90% of the time. The remaining 10% or less is used for tasks like playback, copying, transferring and backing up footage
While a PC intermittently writes, reads, and transfers small amounts of data to a hard drive, a CCTV system continually writes large amounts of high-definition footage from several sources or streams onto the hard drive, 24/7.
Therefore, surveillance hard drives need to be able to withstand high write workloads, which PC hard drives are not particularly optimized to do, even though they can still do the job but for a considerably shorter period of time. Desktop hard drives are designed to operate for 8 to 12 hours each day, with power-down periods in between working days; otherwise, overexertion can significantly reduce their lifespan.
Surveillance drives can also come with a specific workload rating that indicates how much data should ideally be run through them, a feature that is great for keeping the drive at the lowest possible risk of failure.
Reliability
While surveillance grade hard drives are built to record high-definition footage from multiple video streams or cameras constantly, normal PC hard drives are unsuited for constant operational demands and are susceptible to failure when used for the constant, 24×7 high-density operations in a surveillance environment.
Both types of hard drives have voice coil magnets that move the write head across the spinning disks, and how fast the write head can be moved across the disk is determined by the size and design of the voice coil magnets. In addition to employing more durable damper plates to support the write heads, surveillance hard drives also use bigger, stronger magnets that enable quicker write accelerations, a characteristic that boosts the drive’s performance and reliability when compared to a desktop drive.
Power Profile
Surveillance and video hard disk drives have firmware optimized for energy conservation, thus giving them a low power profile that helps maintain optimal operating temperatures while working relentlessly, which would otherwise be disastrous for a hard drive.
Cost
Surveillance hard drives do cost slightly more than regular PC hard drives due to their optimized firmware, which is necessary for withstanding the heavy write workload and general reliability demands of a DVR or NVR. Since PC hard drives aren’t designed for the continuous use necessary in surveillance applications, they tend to wear out considerably more quickly, and the potential losses incurred from replacing them at the end of their short lifespans or losing valuable security footage may be intolerable.
Can a Surveillance hard drive be used in a PC?
Technically, a PC drive and a surveillance drive can be interchanged because both still perform the basic functions of a hard disk drive, except that the latter is particularly optimized for surveillance applications where there’s a need for constant high-density writing.
A standard PC hard drive would be more than adequate, unless the PC is intended for a specific activity. Network-attached storage (NAS) drives are a preferable choice for a PC if long-term, high-intensity storage is required.
Like surveillance drives, NAS is built for 24/7 operations and random data retrieval and storage by multiple users.
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