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HP Midline vs Entry Level

J

jtr8178

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 21, 2008
Messages
266
We are building a small server for one of our outlying locations. It will be used only for a security camera system & recording. The vendor (CDW) is recommending we use HP Midline hard drives, which cost around $325 for per 1 TB drive. I've read up about them a little, and it appears that they are much more reliable and will last longer than the "Entry" model.

Since this server isn't hyper-critical, I'm thinking about saving the money to just get the Entry level models, and replace if/when I have a failure.

Does anyone have any experience or comments on this?

CDW is obviously an HP house, so they push the the HP product pretty well. Thanks in advance.
 
No, if this is for security within a business, you need to get the nearline-class drives as they will be quite a bit more durable, will most likely last longer, has higher uptime insurance, and is designed for 24x7 usage.
Desktop-class drives are not designed for 24x7 usage.
 
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They ARE called midline drives by HP. Entry (ETY) and Midline (MDL). While they are considered near-line drives, HP chooses to use the midline term. The ETY drives are still designed for a business application, like an entry-level server. The ETY drives are still designed for 24x7 uptime, but neither drive is designed for 24x7 workload. The ETY drives are not the same exact drive HP puts in a desktop. They do have different firmware and TLER, and do go through different testing processes.

http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/servers/proliantstorage/serial/sata/entry/index.html
http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/13021_na/13021_na.html
http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/servers/proliantstorage/serial/sata/entry/benefits.html

I would personally have no problem putting ETY drives in this application, especially if large amounts of storage are a requirement (for longer retention). You will get way more storage compared to MDL drives. If you don't need massive amounts of storage, and have a certain budget to worth within, then seeing if the MDL drives can fit the budget and still provide enough storage is worthwhile.

Lastly, if you can provide yourself some extra protection with ETY drives by doing something like RAID6 and have multiple hot-spares.

All this considered, you also need to evaluate how important the security recordings are to your company and what it would mean if a full history of recordings where lost. If they are THAT important, spending more money MDL drives aren't even necessarily the right answer. You would be looking at enterprise SAS drives, or a secondary storage point/backup for the recordings. If the recordings are more for reference shouod something bad occur, and they are not needed for historical evidence over time, then perhaps a full loss of recordings isn't a big deal, and you can prepare extra hardware so you can rebuild the storage fast and not have a long recording outage, all while saving a lot of $$$ by using ETY drives.
 
Thanks for the update, you gotta love marketing.
Kind of like how Apple has custom names for everything, like how a "Super Drive" is really a DVD burner, or how a "Mighty Mouse" is a wireless optical mouse, or how their "Airport Extreme" is just an 802.11g wifi NIC.

Whatever, it's a nearline-class drive. :rolleyes:

HDClown said:
All this considered, you also need to evaluate how important the security recordings are to your company and what it would mean if a full history of recordings where lost. If they are THAT important, spending more money MDL drives aren't even necessarily the right answer. You would be looking at enterprise SAS drives, or a secondary storage point/backup for the recordings. If the recordings are more for reference shouod something bad occur, and they are not needed for historical evidence over time, then perhaps a full loss of recordings isn't a big deal, and you can prepare extra hardware so you can rebuild the storage fast and not have a long recording outage, all while saving a lot of $$$ by using ETY drives.
Click to expand...

^ This is what it would eventually come down to in the end.

Really though, desktop-class drives are not meant to be run 24x7, but you know what, everyone is insistent on recommending them for such applications, so I say, have at it.

However, when your array goes to hell during a rebuild due to cheap drives being used, don't blame me. ;)

Have fun!
 
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Thanks for the input guys. The data isn't that important ... We'll just need to retrieve it "just in case" ... So I'm going to price the ETY hard drives and see what they are. We only record 7 days at a time, and it is just in case we have a theft, accident in the yard, etc... We are a truck dealership, so it is pretty boring at the stores about 99.999% of the time.
 
jtr8178 said:
Thanks for the input guys. The data isn't that important ... We'll just need to retrieve it "just in case" ... So I'm going to price the ETY hard drives and see what they are. We only record 7 days at a time, and it is just in case we have a theft, accident in the yard, etc... We are a truck dealership, so it is pretty boring at the stores about 99.999% of the time.
Click to expand...

You should find out from your insurance carrier if you have a requirement for the cameras and dvr, and if they have a requirement for the storage. You would be surprised but some of them have very specific requirements for data retention, storage, redundancy, etc. and if you don't follow them they will abrogate your policy if they are found to have been ignored.
 
jtr8178 said:
Thanks for the input guys. The data isn't that important ... We'll just need to retrieve it "just in case" ... So I'm going to price the ETY hard drives and see what they are. We only record 7 days at a time, and it is just in case we have a theft, accident in the yard, etc... We are a truck dealership, so it is pretty boring at the stores about 99.999% of the time.
Click to expand...

7 days at a time... so 24/7. Logic, ftw!
 
jtr8178 said:
LOL, I meant we only keep up to 7 days of recordings. Most camera's are on motion sensors, so they don't even record after business hours.
Click to expand...

Ah, that makes sense. ;)
Let us know how those drives work out for you.
 
You say there will be several drives, but not how they will be configured (RAID ?). That's important information needed to decide.
 
Aesma said:
You say there will be several drives, but not how they will be configured (RAID ?). That's important information needed to decide.
Click to expand...

If they are desktop-class, I would hope RAID6 would be used, just in case another drive fails during rebuild.
 
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