Do you want to setup a nature camera, a surveillance camera, or some other camera, but you are worring about writing 24/7 video data to an SSD or SD card will wear it out? Sure, you can try using larger SSD storage to delay the onset of failure, but will this really be adequate? Indeed, it will be.
20190117/DuckDuckGo how long does solid state storage last for security camera
20190117/http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/281343-32-cameras-system
Here are some calculations to back this up.
Suppose writing video data for 30 minutes consumes 1.4 GB of storage.
1.4 GB/30 min * 2 * 24 = 67.2 GB/day
67.2 GB/day * 7 = 470.4 GB/week
So, how long will your SSD last at a write durability of 100,000 cycles?
100,000 / 365.25 rewrites/year = 273.785 years
100,000 / (365.25 / 7) rewrites/year = 1916.496 years
So, if you can store up a full week’s worth of footage on a solid-state footage, you have no need to worry about wearing it out too quickly. That being said, you definitely want to go for the larger storage if you can. It’s far easier to keep administrative decisions for keep/delete/archive data to be fully completed at the end of a week, although some initial data entry may be done throughout the week.
So yeah, go for at least 512 GB of solid-state storage if you want to do 24/7 video footage. Then from there, you can copy what you want to keep to a hard disk drive at the end of the week.
How much storage would you need to save 5 years worth of video footage from a single camera recording at 1.4 GB per 30 minutes? Note that gigabytes and terabytes here are base 1000, not base 1024.
67.2 GB/day * 365.25 days/year * 5 years = 122.724 TB per 5 years
Well, that’s a doosey. As of 2019, I’ve drawn the line at 6 TB of offline storage. Furthermore, I might only allocate a maximum of 1 TB for surveillance footage. Assuming most of the footage is practically “duplicates,” that means we can only save 0.815% of footage in terms of time. From my manual push-button “for dummies” around-the-house activity logs I’ve been keeping, in terms of human actions versus full time, this appears to be a correct amount to save. And yes, this also assumes we’re only working with one camera. Each additional camera added divides down the available storage.
And, if you only leep 1% of the data, how much time is that?
5 years * 1% = 18.262 days
And if you are only willing to watch 3 hours of that video data per day, how long will it take you to watch it all?
18.262 days = 438.3 hrs
438.3 hrs / 3 hrs-to-watch/day = 146.1 days-to-watch
= 40% of-year-to-watch
So, to manually review 5 years worth of video data, you might spend half of one year in total days reviewing it? And we’re only talking the remainder of the 1% of time-data saved out of the 99% of time-data discarded!