- Surveillance-Optimized Storage for 24 x 7 Security Systems
- Consistent Performance in Multi-Drive Surveillance Systems
- Improved Time-To-Ready for Motion Sensing Cameras
Latest Biggest Best AV from Seagate
05/27/2014
This review is from: Seagate ST4000VX000 4TB 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Surveillance Hard Drive Bare Drive
Pros:
Seagate produced the first AV drive, the first 4TB AV drive, and is now on its seventh generation of AV drives. There is a difference between AV and regular desktop drives. Desktop drives read more that they write, have long periods of inactivity, and have data integrity as the highest priority. A desktop drive will pause to do error recovery and re-read data to do this. Desktop drives of this size are commonly rated to only read/write < 55 TB per year. AV drives used in surveillance/video can spend most of their power-on time writing continuously. For example, 4 x 1080p streams for a year is about 200 TB. Bit level integrity is not as important in these drives. In an AV application it is better to have a segment of incorrect data delivered in a stream (a few bad pixels) than to have a long delay before recording starts (loss of multiple video frames).
Seagate has two 4TB models in the AV category. This one - the “Surveillance” model- is ST4000VX000. They also make the “Video” model ST4000VM000. Both are based on a 1TB per platter, 8 head design. The VM spins at 5900 RPM. I think the VX also does 5900 RPM but there is some conflicting info on the internet – see Con section. The “Video” model is tuned for use in a personal video recording box as a single drive – think consumer DVR. The “Surveillance” model is intended for video surveillance either as a single drive or as a member of an array of up to 16 drives. Depending on what compression is used, one of these drives should hold well over 400 hours of HD content.
The surveillance drive supports the ATA streaming command set which is where the AV magic happens. Commands exist to optimize buffer management depending on number of video streams. Commands also let the software/appliance developer set limits for streaming read/write command completion times. The marketing hand-out on this drive mentions another feature called “Idle 3 Power Setting”. It is not entirely clear what this is. I suspect that in reality it is just regular idle mode (heads tracking, spindle up to speed, buffer enabled).
This drive plays well in simple surveillance DVRs as well as NVRs. In a DVR, the input comes from video capture card(s) where analog video is encoded and processed on the DVR. In this setting, as many as 32 cameras can work with a single drive. In the NVR (network video recorder) arena, IP cameras are used to feed a NAS-type device often with RAID-ed disks.
Specs say it handles 180MB/s sustained data flow and say it’s compatible with up to 16 co-mounted drives. It is more suitable for use in a storage array that the older SV35 series because it has Rotational Vibration sensors like many enterprise data drives do. It has a 3 year warranty (not 1 year like it says on newegg) and a 1M-hr MTBF.
Cons:
Not a problem with the drive, but do your homework on what you need before buying. Although directly available to consumers, I expect most folks will be getting this drive bundled in as a security solution from an intermediary because not everyone can put together a surveillance VMS system from scratch. Seagate marketing specifically mentions: Dahua Technology, March Networks, Hikvision, EverFocus, NUUO, and QNAP.
Also, not a problem with the drive, but there is some lack of clarity on the marketing/spec front. Item one (marketing piece): “Idle 3 Power setting allows immediate recording when motion sensing is detected in a camera.” There is no mention of “Idle 3 power setting” in the spec sheet, the product manual, the AT commands, or really anywhere in the internal Seagate documents according to the first couple levels of phone tech support. I suspected this was dreamed up by marketing and just means regular idle mode (as in fully powered/spun up but not actually writing).
Support followed up by email and they said the following: "Please understand that "Idle 3 Mode" is really a marketing term which because of its newness has proven to difficult to find much information beyond the fact that it is a special state that reduces the drive's power consumption by moving the heads on the ramp and reduces the drive's spin speed."
In reading the product manual to try to figure out Idle3 there was also a cryptic footnote to the power consumption for Idle mode “with DIPLM Enabled”. I asked what DIPLM stands for since it is not mentioned anywhere else including google. They will have to research this and get back to me.
Item two: Several non-seagate sites on the internet suggested that the drive’s spindle speed might really be 7200 RPM. The product manual does not help with this, but tech support was able to confirm that although there was a version of the 3TB ST3000VX000 that was 7200, the current latest version of the 3TB ST3000VX002 and this drive, the 4TB ST4000VX000 are 5900RPM.
Overall Review:
Various new factors are impacting the HDD market for video surveillance. New global legislation is increasing the maximum retention time for video surveillance and legal requirements for surveillance in certain public places are being mandated. When you add the fact that image quality and resolution is going up, the market for surveillance hard drives is estimated to increase to over a billion dollars per year around 2017. This would be over 7 million units per year. By comparison PC HDD sales fell 7% in 2013 to 444 million units.
Most modern security DVR’s support multiple drives and capacities of > 3Tb per drive. Most modern NVR’s can use >3TB drives, also. However, if you are trying to put this into a consumer DVR device, do your homework. Many consumer-level DVR’s will not support 4TB drive sizes. For instance, Direct TV needs to be the HR34 or HR44/Genie models to use either 3 or 4 TB drives. Tivo needs to be series 4 or greater because of either hardware or software limits. Most Scientific Atlanta HD box internal drives are IDE not SATA, and so on.
I tested this drive for 24 hours each in: PC based security DVR system with Geovision cards, and a linux-based NVR where I removed the other drives to just test this one (the old ones were 3TB). The drive did its job in both applications. The main thing I noticed was how very quiet it was.
I tested Seagate customer phone support for this review by asking the technical questions I mentioned above. They were very responsive. On a weekday at around lunchtime I got a real person in the US on the second ring. They spent a lot of time trying to get the right answers questions. They followed up by e-mail.
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