Hard Drive Upgrades
I touched on it already. But one area that I never finished the ICYU build was in its total storage. I had planned on adding in a few large-capacity hard drives but just went with a few 6TB drives that I had on hand at the time. This was enough to get things rolling and was an upgrade from our previous setup which didn’t have internal storage at all and was running a USB hard drive. With future upgrades in mind, I did install a three-bay trayless hot swap that is installed in the front of the system. This way I wouldn’t have to pull the server out and open things up for upgrades. I didn’t plan on diving back inside like I did with these other upgrades but this still is easier to get to. I started off by moving what footage I could over to the one larger 8TB drive from one of the 6TB drives. Then I installed one of the two upgraded drives. That gave me room to move things from the second 6TB drive over and then replace the second drive. It took a LONG time to get everything moved over but without data loss, this was the way.
So what drives did I go with? While hard drive prices are always dropping, getting two big-capacity drives is still expensive. I ended up coming across the enterprise hard drives from serverpartdeals.com. While researching them, I saw recommendations on Reddit. But most importantly they were offering enterprise drives that would hold up to the 24 hour a day use in our server but at significantly lower prices than most other places. Specifically, I was eying the Seagate Exos X20 ST18000NM003D 18TB. Now all of this was happening a while back and their pricing and selection is always changing. But even now the ST18000NM003D is $189.99 for the manufacturer-recertified drive whereas on Amazon a renewed Seagate IronWolf 18TB is $198.98 and the IronWolf Pro is $229.99. New 18TB drives are $100+ more in the $300+ range. ServerPartDeals was where I would have been buying drives for this build either way, but I did reach out to them and they sent over two of the Seagate Exos X20 ST18000NM003D 18TB drives.
Being manufacturer recertified, I was curious how the new drives would ship. ServerPartDeals sent them in a box with packing materials, then both drives themselves come in their own brown box with thick air-filled padding as well. The drives also come sealed in static bags with the proper pull tab to open up, just like a new drive. In fact, there wasn’t anything about the drives that would indicate they were recertified other than the label itself on the drive which has that printed on it just below the Seagate logo.
Before getting the drives up and running, I checked them out using CrystalDiskInfo. One of the drives has just two power-on counts and 15 hours of total use and the other had 7 power-ons but significantly more hours at 496 hours. I also ran one of the drives through CrystalDiskMark to check out its performance with both the IOPS and MB/s performance. Because I don’t get the chance to test many spinning drives these days with the focus being on SSDs. It is impressive that spinning drives are reaching SATA 3 SSD numbers for read and write performance, of course, access times are still significantly lower. That is important though, the larger these drives get the longer it is going to take to transfer all of the files. Even with our 6TB drives, it took all day. I don’t look forward to the day where I have to transfer everything off of one of these and 18TB drives aren’t even at the top end of capacity.
The capacity upgrade let me move our inside cameras which some are only used from time to time to the original smaller 8TB drive and set them to record directly to that drive because they aren’t accessed as often. Then from there all of the outside cameras go to our fast SSD for three days allowing quick access to those recordings and they then move to the large capacity drives for long-term storage. The end result is nearly 6 months of storage for our inside cameras and two full months of storage for our outside cameras. My original goal was 30 to 40 days of overall storage and this surpasses that leaving a little room for expansion if needed. The combination of all of the different upgrades has smoothed out performance on this server and being concerned that it might miss something important is no longer a concern. That isn’t to say we haven’t had issues, but almost all have been issues with cameras or the wiring to cameras. With 6-7 years now of use, some of the network cables that I originally ran to the outside cameras haven’t held up to the UV and weather. I knew this would be an issue and did pick up proper outside rated CAT 6 and just have been upgrading as we go.
