SSD for CCTV - Should you bother?
WHAT’S IN THE VIDEO
In this video I’m showing you how simple it is to replace an HDD with an SSD on a standard home and small business CCTV recorder. I then go on to talk about the benefits and downsides of using SSD on CCTV.
If you don’t feel like watching the video, it’s summarised below.
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Samsung 870 QVO 4TB SSD - Currently sell for about £250
BENEFITS OF SSD DRIVES FOR CCTV
The benefits are really no different than standard benefits that SSD drives have over spinning hard drives. The problem is that, for most CCTV installations, these benefits won’t matter or benefit anyone at all.
No Moving Parts - Possible better lifespan due to no moving parts
Totally Silent - Depending on where you keep your CCTV system, spinning hard drives can generate hum and have the standard rattling sound when doing any kind of non-linear access.
Faster Seek Times - If you review footage a lot, this can be a big deal. The cameras need to keep recording at all times so, if your system only has one drive, looking through footage and scanning footage for smart events can give a slow ‘surveillance’ hard drive a tough time.
DOWNSIDES OF SSD DRIVES FOR CCTV
Believe it or not, writing to flash memory uses much more power than writing on a 5400rpm surveillance drive. Neither use a lot but it’s something like 4-5W for HDD and 9W for SSD.
SSD drives are at least double the cost per GB than HDD. That’s only for lower reliability and lower life QLC memory. If you were to go for MLC memory, it would more likely be four times the cost minimum.
SSD drives have potential performance issues when they are full. This is something I’ve read many times but as my CCTV SSD drive isn’t full yet, I haven’t been able to test it. I’ll add a comment to the video with my discoveries in a few weeks.
CCTV is all about writing data and SSD drives only wear when they write. They have a finite amount that can be written to the flash memory. This is called the TBW rating (terabytes written). In the case of the Samsung 870 QVO 4TB drive, it has a TBW of 1,440TB. This is fairly low due to the cheaper QLC flash memory it uses. Is this a problem? Take a look at the calculation below to see how long the drive will theoretically last based on my current CCTV setup (clearly this will drop if you have more cameras connected or write at much higher bitrates).
This TBW calculation shows that you probably write less data than you think!