Surveillance Hard Drives

Hard drives built for continuous writing, which is what a CCTV recorder does every second of every day. A desktop drive in a recorder typically fails within a year: it is designed for intermittent use and it parks its heads, which is exactly wrong for a device that never stops writing. Surveillance drives — Seagate SkyHawk and Western Digital Purple are the two common ranges — are rated for the workload and for the temperature inside a recorder chassis. Size the drive by how many days of footage you need to keep, not by price: roughly 1TB per camera per month at 4MP is a reasonable starting estimate.