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Seagate

Seagate Hard Drives and Portable Storage in South Africa

Seagate makes storage for very different jobs, and the distinction matters more than capacity does. A drive built to sit on a desk and be switched off at night is not the same as one built to write continuously for years, and putting the wrong one in an NVR is a common and expensive mistake. NeonSales stocks portable, NAS and surveillance drives.

What Seagate products does NeonSales stock?

  • Portable external: Expansion in 2TB, 4TB and 5TB, One Touch 4TB in black
  • NAS: IronWolf 2TB
  • Surveillance: SkyHawk drives, also grouped in their own collection

Which drive family for which job?

Family Built for Use it in
Expansion / One Touch Portable, USB powered, intermittent use Backups, moving files, external storage on a desk
IronWolf NAS enclosures running continuously with multiple drives Home and small office NAS, file servers
SkyHawk Constant sequential writing from cameras DVRs and NVRs, nothing else

Do not put a desktop drive in a recorder

This is the single most useful thing on this page. A surveillance system writes continuously, twenty four hours a day, forever. A portable or desktop drive is rated for a fraction of that workload and will fail early under it, usually within a year or two rather than the several you expected. Surveillance-rated drives handle the sustained write load and are tuned to prioritise streaming over error correction, which is the right behaviour when dropping a frame matters less than stalling the recording.

NAS drives are also different

IronWolf is built for a NAS, meaning continuous operation alongside other drives in a vibrating enclosure, with firmware suited to RAID rebuilds. It is a genuinely different product from both a portable drive and a surveillance drive, and using a desktop drive in a multi-bay NAS causes the same premature failure problem.

Common questions

How much storage does my CCTV need? As a rough guide, an 8 channel 2MP system recording continuously fills 2TB in around two to three weeks. Higher resolution and more channels multiply that quickly. Work out your required retention period first, then size accordingly.

Can I use a portable drive for backups from a recorder? Yes, exporting clips to a portable drive is exactly what they are for. It is continuous recording that they cannot handle.

What is the difference between Expansion and One Touch? Both are portable USB drives. One Touch adds backup software features and different styling.

Does capacity affect reliability? Not meaningfully within a family. Choose capacity on retention needs and workload rating on where the drive will live.

Related: Seagate SkyHawk · NVRs · DVRs · CCTV Accessories · CCTV