Holy crap, $450 for a WD purple 10TB drive now!

[bp2008]

For years I have just been buying used or refurbished hard drives. Only those verified to have no bad sectors. And I've had no more failures than I used to get from buying new. The prices are a lot higher than they used to be but I believe they are still cheaper than buying new. Ebay tends to have the best prices in my experience, but you can find them on amazon too. I get most of mine from MDD or goHardDrive and have used their warranty service without issue before.

If you go this route, you have to be careful to note the difference between "SAS" and "SATA" hard drives. SAS drives are often cheaper than SATA on the used market because they require a SAS controller and cables. It can be worth the added expense if the deal is good enough on the drives (particularly when buying many drives). As a bonus, the common LSI SAS controllers and cables are backwards-compatible with SATA HDDs so you can run a mix and not be limited to only SAS.

 

[Arjun]

Feels like all of those cheap refurbished deals on Seagate Barracuda and Hitachi Drives were full-fledged foreshadowing on what was to come

 

[redpoint5]

I would be modifying my recording methods to reduce storage consumption before I pay the insane prices right now. Just wait 1-2 years and the market will flood with storage and prices will be at historic lows. Remember that all shortages are followed by glut.

 

[Flintstone61]

 

[JPmedia]

I would be modifying my recording methods to reduce storage consumption before I pay the insane prices right now. Just wait 1-2 years and the market will flood with storage and prices will be at historic lows. Remember that all shortages are followed by glut.

I just won't buy until the time is right. I won't trade quality of picture for extended storage. What good is having an extended timeline of clips if you can't properly identify the events

 

[JPmedia]

And if I have an event worth keeping for future use, I can always transfer it to an external drive or USB drive. I have events on external drives from 6 years ago. Never know when you're going to need to blackmail someone

 

[redpoint5]

I have 2 cameras that record the main feed 24x7 and get a couple weeks of footage on a 5TB drive. I've considered recording just the secondary channel with the primary only recording on trigger. Also been messing around with h.265 again. With firmware at the latest, I get decent quality with CBR and can scrub through video.

 

[Arjun]

When I started out with IP Cameras back in 2017, I started with 2x 4TB WD Purple Hard Drives - they still spin 'till this day along with other higher capacity drives I obtained during the glory days of shucking external hard drives

 

[Flintstone61]

I have 1 of those 4TB WD purples spinning out in an NVR that's never been indoors. its on its 4th DVR/XVR/NVR, it outlasted my upgrading FAFO's since at least 2019 or 2020. kicker is I think Bought it used /.....
Update: 04/27/2026 I opened up all my old units, seeing if I had any hidden Gems larger than 1TB. fornd the Night Owl analog with -1TB Toshiba, the Amcrest XVR -1TB Wd Blue, Amcrest 8 port NVR small victory, -4TB
( 4TB drive with a born on date of 2019) I just initialized and formatted it in Windows.

 

[Flintstone61]

Like Crazy Eddies , everything must Go!
I don't want to get caught in the Mad Rush on the Toilet Paper version of Data Storage shortages.
But because of this thread I've been scouring the house for old drives. ( like Crazy Eddie)
Here's what I've found so far.

40Gb Seagate
80GB Seagate Barracuda
120Gb Samsung 840 Evo
160GB WD Caviar Blue
250GB Samsung 870 Evo
1TB Toshiba 7200 HDWD110
QTY4 - 1.0 TB Toshiba's! Part# DT01ACA100
1TB WD Caviar Blue
4TB WD 40PURZ

 

[johnfitz]

But because of this thread I've been scouring the house for old drives. ( like Crazy Eddie)

I'm surprised you didn't find an ST-225.

 

[Flintstone61]

I'm surprised you didn't find an ST-225.

lol, I'm so new to computing that 5.25" was being phased out when I got into my first 486 and Pentium 60. I had one semester of Windows 3.1 for workgroups in 1995.
The Geeks at Best Buy laughed at me when I said I was trying to install windows 95 on my Western Digital Caviar 80MB and setup would not run due to insufficient drive space. I asked if this MAXTOR 8.4 GB
would work in there and they were like "good Luck with that"
So I set forth to learn everyFnthing I could about Pc's
Because I was not going thru with that again.
I took a PC repair and diagnostic class at College of Dupage,
And a Cisco Networking intro class as well.
Then I got hired to be the Geek at Microcenter in Mpls in 2001
Never laughed anyone out of the store. mutha fuckin Best Buy...

 

[samplenhold]

Still working on my BI Server upgrade. Almost there. Next I got to pull down a screen from upstairs and fire up this baby, get WIN 11 loaded, assign drive letters, and test system. Hope to do that in the next few days.

Then the next part will be to pull the three 10TB purples that I have had in the old system since 2018 and put it in the new box, preserving the drive letters. Then the two SSD's and finally transferring all of the 'C-Drive' crap to the new system. Fire up BI and see what happens. If all of that works out, then finish up cable maintenance in the box, close it up and move it into its new home. That will bring me up to 70TB total storage for now.

But I do need to install some drip irrigation systems for my wife's raised planter beds. Since the temps are supposed to be cooler this weekend, I'll probably do the trenching then. The hardware arrives Monday.

 

[Flintstone61]

Still working on my BI Server upgrade. Almost there. Next I got to pull down a screen from upstairs and fire up this baby, get WIN 11 loaded, assign drive letters, and test system. Hope to do that in the next few days.

Then the next part will be to pull the three 10TB purples that I have had in the old system since 2018 and put it in the new box, preserving the drive letters. Then the two SSD's and finally transferring all of the 'C-Drive' crap to the new system. Fire up BI and see what happens. If all of that works out, then finish up cable maintenance in the box, close it up and move it into its new home. That will bring me up to 70TB total storage for now.

But I do need to install some drip irrigation systems for my wife's raised planter beds. Since the temps are supposed to be cooler this weekend, I'll probably do the trenching then. The hardware arrives Monday.

 

[redpoint5]

I learned 'puters by breaking my parent's $3,000 Pentium 100, 16MB RAM, 1.2GB HD repeatedly and tech support being no help. We were poor too, so the fact we had such a beast back then was a huge financial sacrifice on their part. Never had a computer related class (except programming in high school), but I've been in IT my whole career.

Curious why folks need so much storage unless they are running 30 cameras on a campus or something? I export out the interesting stuff and just let the 2 week old recordings get overwritten. My 5TB drive has to be over a decade old now with continuous usage. Could be on its last leg, but no signs of failure yet.

Anyone running an UnRAID NAS for their storage? Good way to dust out the Hodge podge of drives and put them to use.

 

[samplenhold]

Curious why folks need so much storage

We travel several times a year and usually are gone for 3-6 weeks at a time. Sometimes I do not have a good enough connection from our RV to the house to spool off things I would like to keep. When our daughter passed back in September, we were away. Rushed home and by the time I could actually look at recordings, the ones that I wanted of her were already gone.

Everyone's needs are different. I would give my eye teeth to have some of those last videos of us together.

 

[Flintstone61]

I learned 'puters by breaking my parent's $3,000 Pentium 100, 16MB RAM, 1.2GB HD repeatedly and tech support being no help. We were poor too, so the fact we had such a beast back then was a huge financial sacrifice on their part. Never had a computer related class (except programming in high school), but I've been in IT my whole career.

Curious why folks need so much storage unless they are running 30 cameras on a campus or something? I export out the interesting stuff and just let the 2 week old recordings get overwritten. My 5TB drive has to be over a decade old now with continuous usage. Could be on its last leg, but no signs of failure yet.

Anyone running an UnRAID NAS for their storage? Good way to dust out the Hodge podge of drives and put them to use.

16MB Ram!!! Wowser, that was a Metric Crap-Ton ( IPcamtalk abbreviation: MCT) back then. Yeah, tinkering is how I figured out a bunch of stuff with Windows, and PC hardware. and cars, and well just about everything.
I had an instance when managing the 74 unit Condo, where 4-6 weeks of storage helped see a pattern of mail theft, with 3 instances, ( that we know of) the one going back about 5-6 weeks was helpful.
Strange things were happening to peoples bank accounts and missing mail.
During the George Floyd riots, somebody got into a St. Paul mail facility and made off with some cars and some keys.
One of the master keys that opens mailboxes and so forth was being used to open our outgoing and incoming banks of mail boxes.
One night the guy got spooked by a resident and left too quickly and made a mistake.
He didnt fully re-lock one bank of boxes.

The HOA board member got her mail and noticed the issue and called me.
It was the NightOwl analog DVR that caught it. It had almost 2 months ( as I recall about 6-7 weeks) of retrievable data.
The Bi Machine only had 3.5-4 weeks of storage and a lobby view with a partial view of the vestibule where mail boxes were.
here is that night. Notice the bank on lower right, with unit 321 on it. he got spooked and left.

 

[Flintstone61]

 

[Flintstone61]

Here is ENTIRE reason I got Schnookered into Security. Week one of my new Maintenance Job. Labor day weekend. 3 days of outgoing mail not getting picked up. Kid ripped open the mail box door, and then people were getting calls from there bank about problems with checks. Yes, Old folk were/are still mailing checks to Utilities like Comcast in 2017. I had an investigator come knocking a few days after wanting know if I had any footage. We had one lobby camera this is all you got. @looney2ns This was before I knew about posting iphone recording of a LCD screen of Grainy images to IPcamtalk!
It was like my Geek squad Best buy experience all over again but with Cameras.





View attachment IMG_5122.MOV

 

[redpoint5]

Cameras are pointless. We need Batman.