Is it Possible to Use Consumer SSD Drives on a Core and Core 2?

Is it Possible to Use Consumer SSD Drives on a Core and Core 2?

DVR Express Core 2
  • Consumer SSDs will not be recognized by Core 2 devices.
  • VidIO Drive Modules are the only storage media that will function with a DVR Express Core 2 device. These must be purchased from IO Industries.
DVR Express Core
  • Supports consumer SSDs.
  • There are no restrictions so long as the drives support a 3Gb/s SATA connection,
  • However, there's merit to always buying drives from IO Industries as we ensure they are compatible, perform continuously at the rate required for uncompressed video recording, and have a long lifespan. 

Many consumer drives cannot continuously write data at the rate your camera will produce it, leading to gaps ("dropped frames") in the recordings you make. In a typical PC, data is buffered by large RAM caches before being transferred to SSDs, but this is not the case with the design of the DVR Express Core series. Minimal RAM caching is employed, so as to limit the loss of data in the event of a sudden power loss. As such, the SSDs need to be able to keep up with the incoming data rate, and not all models of SSDs can do this. Recording uses sequential writing and while a manufacturer might list a sequential read/write speed, those numbers are ideal cases and change over time. This change over time is where we have done a lot of testing and found many drives drop in their performance while still under their TBW warranty. The long term performance of a drive is not something that can be determined from a specifications sheet. This might lead to some very discouraging time and cost of testing consumer drives, only to find they were inadequate for video recording. It is also more difficult for us to support a customer using 3rd party drives as without having tested them ourselves, a reliability or performance issue could be drive related and might be something that we couldn’t remedy.

The proven advantages of using VidIO Drive Modules (VDMs) are:
  • VidIO Drive Modules are high performance SSDs which are extensively tested through all performance characteristics of our product including pre-triggering schemes.
  • 5 year warranty where some consumer drives only offer a 1 year warranty.
  • Very high Terbytes Written (TBW) endurance rating which is a metric that can be used for comparison and represents the amount of data that can be written to a drive before it is out of warranty.
  • Optimized for sequential writing.
  • Excellent 3Gbps performance where we have found most manufacturers have poor 3Gbps performance of their 6Gbps rated drives.




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