
Originally Posted by
jhnkvn
I view surveillance HDDs as simply a means on how hard drive companies squeeze more moolah out of their consumers really.
Remember, WD Purple and Seagate SV are "new" offers while CCTVs have been existing before I was even born. You could actually just use your regular disk drives without any problem given that huge corporations have been using them even before these "surveillance HDDs" were marketed.
For one, we're running more than 64+ 480p cameras in our manufacturing compound and I've tested both a lot of hard drives over the years. While we're running Seagate SV hard drives at the moment due to RAID needs, I'd say if it was just one hard drive use, I'd stick with the cheaper Seagate Barracuda (don't get the 3TB ones, they have a rather high defect rate in 2012-2013). Between WD Purple and Seagate SV, get the Purple for power efficiency while Seagate SV for performance.
Anybody who has handled a ton of hard drives before knows that power on hours and reliability figures are useless. Enterprise SAS drives costs five digits per hard drive but perform equally on real-world usage and they aren't any more reliable than their consumer drive counterparts.