Does BI use the ATA Streaming command? a.k.a. WD Purple being fully utilized

[Eric Quarnstrom]

Hi Everyone.
I've been running BI for a couple of years now and have had a couple of hard drives fail on me. The first was the Seagate Barracuda 2TB that came with my computer. It died within a couple months pointing the BI streams to it.
After reading up on this forum, the WD Purple kept being recommended so that plus an SSD was purchased. Now just over two years (luckily with a three-year warranty) the WD Purple 4 TB drive has started throwing errors. :-( Is this a normal longevity for a 24/7 drive?
So here I am researching disk drives again and trying to figure out if the Purple is really giving me anything in terms of longevity and if I (via BlueIris) am using the drive the way it was intended to be used; e.g. the ATA streaming command.
From the WD Site:
"All WD Purple drives are equipped with AllFrame 4k technology, which improves ATA streaming to help reduce frame loss, ..."
So in short, does BI use the ATA Streaming command such that it makes sense to purchase another WD Purple drive.
I've done a bunch of searching but there aren't many articles with "BlueIris" & "ATA Streaming" and none that I could find directly addressing this topic. I apologize if my search skills are lacking.
Thanks in advance,
Eric Q.

 

[tangent]

Bathtub curve - Wikipedia
heat kills hard drives faster.

As to your more specific questions, I'm not sure. Are you using "direct to disk"?

 

[fenderman]

As mentioned constant hd failures point to environmental or hardware defects like bad power... I have over 20 bi machines running for years with no have failures...

 

[Eric Quarnstrom]

Great reminder on the Direct-To-Disk setting. I just reviewed my cameras and it looks like I only set that on my HD cameras. Now all of them are set to write Direct-To-Disk. If the ATA-Streaming command were used anywhere, I would suspect it would be with this setting.
I appreciate the environmental perspective... I'll detail my system below and I very much welcome constructive criticism.
- All of my power is supplied via an APC branded UPS.
- The original Seagate Barracuda drive was an internal drive to my Lenovo H530s
- The WD Purple was attached externally via USB in an external SATA-USB converter/dock. Although it had only passive cooling, the drive was never more than warm to the touch and the SMART diagnostics info never listed heat as an issue (HDA Temperature - Value: 120, Threshold: 0, Worst: 96). The SMART info is not very intuitive to me but if I read this correctly, the temperature threshold of 0 units was never reached (96 was the worst) and is currently at 120 units. I have no idea what the actual temps are. Open to being educated here.
- I have just recently purchased the Mediasonic ProBox HF2-SU3S2 4 Bay 3.5” SATA HDD Enclosure which has active cooling and this is where my replacement drive will go.
Fenderman do you have a link to your typical recording settings & hard drive configuration? As I'm moving things around, now would be a good time for me to copy a known working setup.
Thanks again for the input,
Eric Q.

 

[looney2ns]

Have you read the Wiki at the top of the page?

 

[Eric Quarnstrom]

I have read the Wiki and I've been running what is recommended in the Storage section for a while now.
"Storage
Blue Iris performs best if you put the clip database on a fast solid state disk (SSD). However for video recording, you want a mechanical hard drive (HDD) as these are more cost-effective and have better write endurance. Western Digital Purple drives are a popular option for Blue Iris."
I guess I wanted to go the next level deep in detail such as: What if I threw two WD Purple drives in a "RAID enabled" Windows Storage Pool? Would I still be getting the benefits of the ATA_Streaming AND get fault tolerance? Or would the Storage Pool mask any streaming benefits?
Yes, I do tend to overthink things on occasion. ;-)
Anyhow, the above is what I'll play with next and if the findings are interesting I'll reply back to this thread.
Thanks for the input given thus far,
Eric Q.