Best Hard Drive for CCTV
Security Camera King is your online source for retail CCTV, and we are often asked “what is the best hard drive for CCTV?”
The best way to talk about what the best hard drive for CCTV is starts with explaining a few important CCTV terminologies. Having a better understanding of the technologies involved will help us better answer this question, as it has a few factors that could affect your searches and purchases! “So firstly the big questions are what is CCTV, and what is a hard drive?”
CCTV has been around for quite a long while. It stands for closed circuit television. CCTV is a method of security, or a type of security system. CCTV is composed of a series of security cameras installed around a given location. That location could be a home, a business, an office or professional organization like a government building or a school. What types of cameras are used, where there positioned, and what features they have beyond seeing footage are going to be heavily influenced by the consumers budget and type of location, which in urn determines their security needs. How is all of these footage captured though?
For CCTV to work, we need a central recording station- often called a recorder. Many Many years ago this was done via VCR based recorders which would connect to all the cameras and record their data to a video tape, or tapes. Later on, these tapes could then be played back to review footage and evidence. Next Came the very First DVRs, or digital video recorders. Rather than utilizing video tape for recordings, DVRs would transcode that video footage into digital data for placement on a local hard disk, Video CD, or later a DVD burner.
As time has gone on, the function and purpose of these various formats have had different benefits and purposes. However, times have changed and now, in todays CCTV world, CDs Tape and DVR burners are no longer viable methods of recording. The Hard Drives from that ear have also been superseded by hard drives still, but with far better reliability and capacity.
A Hard drive is a computer storage component. Hard drives come in capacities rated in “gigabytes”, and now just as commonly “terabytes”. A Terabyte is 1000 gigabytes, and a gigabyte is 1000 megabytes. These are all units of computer data for measuring space and storage. The larger the capacity of the disk, the more data it can store. Hard drives are mechanical components, that means they use actual motors and spinning disks, called platters, inside the hard drive casing. This is read by a needle and the data is digitally transferred to the computer system using the disk. Hard dives are somewhat delicate and shouldn’t be moved too rapidly when they are operating.
Todays Recorders use modern hard drives to store their data, this is true for both modern DVRs and IP based network recorders called NVRs. So how does the consumer know which is the best hard drive for their recorder? Well there’s a few things to know, and some other tips we are going to help you with.
Firstly know that our recorders connect to hard drivers which use SATA hard drive connections, just like a desktop PC. While a recorder will likely recognize any hard drive, even ones intended for use with desktop computers which use SATA also, its not a good idea to use a PC hard drive. Instead once should use one of the many CCTV rated hard disks. We recommend the Western Digital Purple Series for CCTV. These disks are designed to undergo long periods of time where they are constantly being read from and written to unlike PC hard drives which often get a break in between. CCTV drives are manufactured to be far less susceptible to wear and tear, and thus ted to cost a bit more per unit of data than less robust alternatives. Using a PC hard drive in your recorder is likely to cause the disk to fail in a very short period of time.
So then how does one know specifically what size of hard disk to get? That’s they key to knowing what the best hard drive for your recorder is, knowing what type – CCTV rated disk, and what size to get. Size is determined by how much footage the user wants to obtain before overwriting. The way Hard Drives in recorders work is by filling up to their maximum data capacity, and then overwriting the oldest data.
How much space you’ll need is determined by the following factors:
- How many Cameras
- How often They’re Recording
- What quality and Framerate they record at
- what encoder and bitrate your using
- how long the user needs a record of footage.
With all this in mind, Security Camera King has developed a calculator to help you determine what size Hard Drive you’ll need. Afterwards, you can either purchase a new hard disk directly from us, or, if your purchasing a new recorder use the dropdown on the products page to select a disk before adding it to your cart and well install the disk for you- no charge! When using the cacluator- for best results select H265 encoding rather than h64 unless you’re using a very old recorder. (If so, its probably time to upgrade, give us a call!)
If you have any more questions on what the best hard drive for your recorder is, don’t hesitate to contact one of our sales pros at 561-288-5258! Thanks again and until next time- stay safe!
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