[homestyle]

I have a security camera set to record on movement detection that records on my laptop hard drive. But I want to extend the hard drive's life. It records 15-20 second clips every 3 minutes or so.

Would I be better off in terms reliability and speed going with a USB thumb drive or external hard drive? The USB outlet is 1.1. Is the speed almost too similar on USB 1.1? And can USB drives take as many write and read cycles as an ssd?

 

[crimsontears809739]

The reliability of USB thumb drives varies greatly from manufacturer to manufacturer. Also, the age has a lot to do with reliability, since the newer gen stuff is more reliable.

From my knowledge (and personal experience), USB thumb drives are much LESS reliable than a current gen SSD.

When a sector fails from too many read/write cycles on a SSD drive the controller is smart enough to mark that sector as bad, access a "new" sector, and automatically write the data to another sector without changing the partition size. When a sector fails from too many read/write cycles on a thumb drive, that data is lost forever. (to the best of my understanding).

If failure is not acceptable on this system, you need to buy a external that automatically creates a RAID 1 array. They are pricey, but fault tolerant systems are always pricey.

The poor mans solution is to use software to make regular backups of your thumb drive.

1 write to the hard drive every 3 minutes isn't going to kill your hard drives life.

 

[Dillmiester]

I've never had a usb drive fail no matter how old, but I have seen many hard drives fail luckily never any of my own.

 

[rui-no-onna]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dillmiester

I've never had a usb drive fail no matter how old, but I have seen many hard drives fail luckily never any of my own.

Try running Firefox or Thunderbird Portable or similar on your thumb drive and you'll probably start seeing corrupt sectors after a couple months of use.

@homestyle
Why not consider using an actual SSD instead paired with a USB enclosure/adapter? Nowadays, you can get a new 120GB SATA3 SSD for $60-70 and the enclosure or adapter for an extra $10. You can probably find deals on used/refurb SATA2 SSDs for $20-30 or so.

I'm not sure how the security camera works but from what you're saying, I'm concerned about the number of spin-up/spin-down cycles it'll cause the HDD per day (HDDs have a finite number of spin-up/down cycles). The thumb drive, well, most thumb drives now use TLC NAND which only has 1,000 P/E cycles. Pair that with much less capable controllers compared to SSDs and you get much shorter lifetime.

 

[crimsontears809739]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dillmiester

I've never had a usb drive fail no matter how old, but I have seen many hard drives fail luckily never any of my own.

Just like rui-no-onna said, start doing alot of read/writes to a thumb drive....your see data loss after only a few months.