Second Dead Hard Disk in BI system

[quest100]

About a year ago I had a ?WD Purple? hard disk fail in my system.

Just had a second hard disk die in my BI system.

Current system has one internal hard disk and four external hard disk, all dedicated for video storage. The external disks are split between two dual eSATA cases driven by a PCI eSATA card with dual eSATA ports. The 18 cameras in my system are recording around 270 Mbps over Ethernet and are on 24/7.

The latest disk that died was a 3 year old, 14 TB Seagate Skyhawk disk. The first symptoms I noticed was erratic increased disk usage as displayed in Task Manager --> Performance. Instead of an active time of a few percent both disks (F and G) in one external enclosure would often jump up to 100%. I then did a speed test and disk G would stutter and pause.

To figure out why I performed a variety of tests (note - I have a third identical external eSATA case):

1. Swap cable ends at PC
2. Swap cable ends at enclosures
3. Swap power supplies
4. Replace power supply
5. Switch disks within case
6. Move disk to third identical case
7. Move enclosure from PC to Mac and use USB port for testing.

Always erratic until I tested on the Mac using SoftRAID's verify test. Disk F tested fine for as long as I let it run. Disk G popped up an error within a couple of minutes and then verify quit a minute later warning me that I might have to restart my computer.

I have now ordered a replacement disk (24 TB Seagate Iron Wolf Pro) and temporarily moved the cameras from disk G to the remaining disks. At this point I am hoping that the fundamental problem is a bad disk and not one of my enclosures causing a disk to go bad.

 

[MikeLud1]

About a year ago I had a ?WD Purple? hard disk fail in my system.

Just had a second hard disk die in my BI system.

Current system has one internal hard disk and four external hard disk, all dedicated for video storage. The external disks are split between two dual eSATA cases driven by a PCI eSATA card with dual eSATA ports. The 18 cameras in my system are recording around 270 Mbps over Ethernet and are on 24/7.

The latest disk that died was a 3 year old, 14 TB Seagate Skyhawk disk. The first symptoms I noticed was erratic increased disk usage as displayed in Task Manager --> Performance. Instead of an active time of a few percent both disks (F and G) in one external enclosure would often jump up to 100%. I then did a speed test and disk G would stutter and pause.

To figure out why I performed a variety of tests (note - I have a third identical external eSATA case):

1. Swap cable ends at PC
2. Swap cable ends at enclosures
3. Swap power supplies
4. Replace power supply
5. Switch disks within case
6. Move disk to third identical case
7. Move enclosure from PC to Mac and use USB port for testing.

Always erratic until I tested on the Mac using SoftRAID's verify test. Disk F tested fine for as long as I let it run. Disk G popped up an error within a couple of minutes and then verify quit a minute later warning me that I might have to restart my computer.

I have now ordered a replacement disk (24 TB Seagate Iron Wolf Pro) and temporarily moved the cameras from disk G to the remaining disks. At this point I am hoping that the fundamental problem is a bad disk and not one of my enclosures causing a disk to go bad.

The drive might be still under warranty.

 

[Diggs]

You may want to add CrystalDIskInfo to your software tools. It's free and will give you detailed info and status on all your spinners.

 

[quest100]

After more testing and using the new disk I determined that external case failed while running with the eSATA interface. The case works fine using its USB interface. I am now running my BI system using eSATA in one enclosure and USB with the other. Looking at them in Performance Monitor they are active just a few per cent of the time. Can’t tell any real difference performance wise between the two interfaces. And have no problems.

I always see warnings not to use USB for storing video. Is this advice just a holdover from the older USBs? I have absolutely no problems storing about 130 Mbps over a single 10 Gbps USB connection to an external enclosure containing two disks.

 

[Diggs]

I always see warnings not to use USB for storing video.

I don't understand this either. USB 3 (gen 1) is rated at 5 Gbps or 10 Gbps for gen2. SATA III is rated 6 Gbps so you can theoretically get better performance with a Gen2 USB. Durability is the same or better in an external drive as they generally run a bit cooler. I need to do some thread searching on the why for. My USB QNAP TR-004 has been chugging along now for quite a few years in continuous service without any issues. Hmm...

 

[wittaj]

The theoretical transfer speed of USB 3.0 is 4.8 Gbit/s (600MBps) and when I tested it with 2 cameras for the live recording, it started stalling after 25min. It can't keep up with the sustained, non-buffering of video cameras.

Theoretical and real-world and sustained are totally different numbers.

It can even struggle with moving already recorded video over.

So here is a real-world demonstration. I was trying to move roughly 260GB of data from NEW to STORED.

I was moving it from a WD Purple (750 MBps) through a USB 3.0 (625MBps) port to another WD Purple HDD (750MBps)

At first it said it would take about 2 hours to move 260GB, but look how fast it dropped to a transfer of 37.7MB/s

Two hours came and went. About 6 hours later, the speed had dropped to less than 2 MB/s.

260 GB (260,000 MB) should have taken 416 seconds or less than 7 minutes at the theoretical speeds.

Those speeds just are not going to cut it for live recording of non buffering video.

Some say they work just fine, but I suspect they simply haven't had an incident happen yet where they found out they are missing recordings.

 

[Diggs]

Hmmm.... Something's strange there. When I image drives to my TR-004 (USB dock to USB TR-004) it rarely drops below 1Gbps. (It's not the 5Gbps the spec says it should be but both read and write are on the same USB buss.)

 

[Teken]

Absolutely wasting your time using USB / eSata to transfer security video 24.7.365! In 2024 the only method to connect and transfer data is via Ethernet, SFP. As it relates to the failed drive I would echo the other members thoughts about checking if the HDD is still under warranty.