Question: Some internal hard drives are advertised as “optimized for surveillance storage” (and similarly, “optimized for gaming”).
What makes these types of drives special or different from “standard” hard drives? Or is it just an advertising gimmick which allows them to pad more money onto the price?
A hard drive is just a hard drive, isn’t it?
Answer: It should have with sequential / random Reading and Writing speeds to do. A harddrive which is “optimized for survelliance” have optimization on its sequential Writing rate, and a pretty decent sequential Reading rate, but random rates are really crappy.Thus its optimized for survelliance Tools which writes data in a steady nice stream.
A gaming harddrive should have a equal weight on all rates, since a game might need to read many small random files, but also a couple of large “stream” files like cutscenes, maps, textures and such.Eg, a gaming harddrive should have the highest possible random rates. Since technically, the sequential rates cannot be worser than random rates (a sequential access is implicitly random, but a random access can or can not be sequential access), thus a gaming harddrive is the opposite of a survelliance harddrive.
A standard harddrive is somewhere between survelliance and gaming.
There is also harddrives that is more designed for long-term storage, and those have a high read rate but bad write rates.
So a drive manufacturer can “concentrate” on specific rate, giving disadvantages on other rates, that then gives the different drive types “survelliande”, “gaming”, “standard”, etc.
However, any drive CAN be used for any purpose. Everything that identifies as a “drive” in a computer is just a simple flat storage area, that can be used for any data storage.