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RDD / Every kind of member drive / Surveillance drives

ST8000VX004 · WD82PURZ · HDWT380 · Hikvision · Dahua · Uniview · NVR RAID

Surveillance drives out of NVRs. Written to around the clock, and overwriting the week you need while you look for the manual.

A surveillance drive spends its life being written to: Seagate's SkyHawk, WD's Purple, Toshiba's S300, rated for a dozen camera streams at once and fitted in Hikvision, Dahua and Uniview recorders, and in Synology Surveillance Station units, often in RAID. They fail like any hard drive, at the heads and through bad sectors, but the job has a clock on it that other drives do not: the recorder overwrites its oldest footage continuously, and every hour it runs after the incident is an hour of the incident closer to gone. The recorder's file system is proprietary, the footage is in fixed blocks by camera and time, and the bench parses it from the image rather than the drive. One surveillance drive imaged is £300 + VAT after the free look, fixed in writing, 3–4 days at the bench; the NVR RAID sets of four to eight drives are £500 + VAT upwards.

Free first lookOne fixed figure in writingNo data, no bill on most jobsReturn postage paid

Rather talk it through? An engineer answers the bench line
0800 6890668

Power down. Label every slot before a drive comes out. Do not rebuild while a second drive is flagged. Do not clear or import a foreign configuration. Do not initialise, reformat or PSID-revert anything. A rebuild reads every sector of every surviving member, and on a set whose drives were bought together it is where the second failure is found. Nothing on the drives gets worse while the server is off.

Surveillance drive symptoms, and what each means.

Not listed? Describe it on the form →
Recorder says HDD error, and keeps recordingThe drive is failing and the loop is still overwriting. Power the recorder off now.Do not delay
Footage from the date needed will not playBad sectors in that region. Image the drive; parse the footage from the image.Do not delay
Recorder restarted and offered to format the driveSay no. The blocks are still there.Do not delay
Clicking from the recorderFailed heads. Power off.Do not delay
NVR RAID degradedOne drive out of the set; the footage spans the set. Send every drive.Do not delay
Drive fine, but the recorder's index is corruptThe footage is in the blocks; the index is rebuilt from them.Everyday job
Packing it and posting it: power the server or shelf down, write the slot number on each drive with a marker before it comes out of its carrier, and keep it in the carrier. Send every member from the set where the set is the job, or the one failed member where the set is healthy and you want it imaged for the rebuild. Each drive travels in an anti-static bag inside its own padding, in a box with nothing able to move. Send the controller only if we ask for it. Insure the parcel for what the data is worth rather than the price of the drives, and use a tracked service. The posting address is not printed anywhere on this site; it arrives by email in reply to the form, with a booking sheet to print; the sheet inside the parcel is what matches it to your enquiry when it is opened. Or hand the sealed parcel in at the nearest of ten drop-off points, your name on the outside and the sheet inside; say where you are on the form and it comes by email. We pay the postage home either way. The whole of it is written up on the guide to packing and posting.

Where it lives, and what fails.

The loopA recorder overwrites its oldest footage the moment it needs the space. Footage the loop has reached is gone; footage it has not reached is often intact even on a failing drive. The recorder should be off from the moment the incident matters.
Proprietary formatsHikvision and Dahua write footage in fixed-size blocks tagged by camera and time, with an index the recorder rebuilds on start. The bench reads the blocks from the image and reconstructs the timeline, camera by camera, without the recorder.
Continuous writesTwelve streams at once, all day, wear a drive differently: bad sectors appear in the regions written most, which are the regions with the newest footage. The image takes those last.
EvidenceFootage needed for an insurer, an employer or the police is copied out with its timestamps and a note of what was recovered from where. The chain of handling is written down.

Model strings, and what they tell us.

Describe yours to us →
Model string What it is What it means on the bench
ST8000VX004SkyHawk 8TBUp to 64 cameras; the commonest NVR drive
ST10000VE001SkyHawk AI 10TBRated for analytics streams
WD82PURZWD Purple 8TBUltrastar-class mechanics
WD101PURPWD Purple Pro 10TBHelium
HDWT380UZSVAToshiba S300 8TBMG-class mechanics

From the parcel arriving to your files going back.

Work we have closed →
01

Logged the day it lands, and the first look costs nothing Free

A case number goes on the parcel and a number on every drive the day it is opened, matched to the slot you wrote on it. An engineer settles what has actually happened before anything spins: the interface, the sector format, the firmware, the security state, and what the controller was saying when it stopped. Back to you come two things together: a straight note of what is liftable and what is not, plus one figure, fixed and written down. Accept it, or decline and owe us nothing.

Nothing to pay for lookingA single figure, put in writingNo rebuilds, no imports, no resets
02

The drive on its own bench

A member drive is read on the equipment its interface needs: a SAS imager for SAS and NL-SAS, a SATA imager for enterprise SATA, a terminated SCSI or Fibre Channel controller for the legacy drives, a PCIe adaptor for NVMe. It is never put back in a server, and never in a controller that will try to rebuild. Drives that answer at full speed are imaged; drives with weak or failed heads go to the clean bench, where matched donors are fitted and the service area repaired before a sector is read.

Read at its native interfaceFailing heads to the clean bench
03

Imaged once, at its native sector size

A surveillance drive is imaged head by head with the most recently written regions last, because that is where a failing drive's bad sectors are. The recorder's block format is then parsed from the image and the footage reconstructed by camera and time, with the incident window copied out first.

Head by head, weak areas lastNative sector size preserved
04

The image, and the set

Where the set is healthy and one member was the job, the image goes back to you on a fresh drive, sector-identical, ready to rebuild from. Where the set is the job, every member is imaged and the array reassembled in software from the images: order, chunk size, parity rotation and the reshape point read from the drives' own metadata, the file system repaired on the virtual volume, never on the originals. The array work is covered in full on our RAID array site, and it happens on the same bench.

One member: a sector-identical image on fresh mediaA set: reassembled in software from the images
05

You see the file list before you pay

What was recovered is listed for you first, and only then does a bill exist. Approve the list and it is invoiced; turn it down and it is not — and where nothing has come back, most jobs carry no charge at all. Recovered data travels home on fresh media bought in for your job, with the postage at our end. Your case is not closed until you have opened the files on a machine of your own.

No charge until you accept the figureFresh media, supplied with the job3–4 days at the bench

What arrives most often

  • Power the recorder off, not the drive out. The loop runs until the power stops.
  • Say no to the format. A recorder that restarted and found its index damaged offers to format; the blocks are still on the drive.
  • Tell us the date, the time and the camera. The copy-out begins there.
  • Overwritten footage does not come back. Footage the loop had not reached usually does, even on a failing drive.

One job, followed all the way through.

UK · RDD-2026-0552JOB LOGGED ✓

A WD82PURZ from a Hikvision DS-7608 with a burglary on it, a clicking drive, and a recorder that had been left running for three days

The drive had failed heads and the loop had been running. A matched head stack was fitted on the clean bench and the drive imaged with the most recently written regions last; the Hikvision block format was parsed from the image and the three cameras that mattered reconstructed for the hour of the break-in. The footage had survived because the recorder's oldest data was elsewhere on the platter.

The hour that mattered, from three cameras4 days here, and back by post
Illustrative example — replace with a genuine case

What helps, and what harms.

Do this much first

  • Power the recorder off now
  • Note the date, time and cameras that matter
  • Send the drive, or every drive from an NVR RAID
  • Tell us the recorder's make and model

What sets us back

  • Leaving the recorder running while you decide
  • Accepting the recorder's offer to format
  • Putting the drive in a PC, which will offer to initialise it
  • Trying the drive in another recorder

Questions answered before you commit.

Can you recover CCTV footage from a failed NVR drive?

Usually, for the footage the loop had not yet overwritten. The drive is imaged and the recorder's format parsed from the image, camera by camera.

The recorder overwrote the footage. Is it gone?

Yes. What comes back is what the loop had not reached. Power the recorder off the moment an incident matters.

Can you recover from a Hikvision or Dahua format?

Yes. Both write footage in fixed blocks tagged by camera and time, and the timeline is rebuilt from the image.

What does it cost?

£300 + VAT for one drive after the free look, fixed in writing; an NVR RAID set of two to four from £500 + VAT, and eight-drive recorders from £1,250 + VAT.

How long does it take?

3–4 days at the bench for one drive; sooner for a specific hour, which is copied out first.

Begin here if yours is doing the same thing.

NVR and CCTV recorder drives →WD Gold and Purple →RAID drive clicking →

Nothing gets worse while it is powered down.

Looking at it is free. Back comes a list of what opened and what did not, together with a single price to finish, set down in writing while you are still free to say no. On most jobs an invoice only follows the data. Until that list reaches you, leave the server off and the drives in their slots.

0800 6890668

Price my jobPacking and posting