Dedicated BI system. Lenovo Thinkserver ts140 (Xeon). -Storage WD Red or Purple?

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n3wb
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Hello Ip Cam Talk,

I'm currently running 1 'rebranded' Hikvision ds-2cd2332-i, using Blue Iris on my desktop PC. I'm wanting to expand, probably 4 cams total near term, up to 8 cameras max, since the gigabit POE switches I'm looking at have 8 ports.

Leaning toward the Thinkserver ts140 with either raid 5 or 10 and using the WD 4TB drives.

The red and purple drives from WD are basically the same price. The purple is supposedly suited for video footage (fullframe)? The red seems slightly more durable(in theory?).

Any advise on which type of hard drive? Red v Purple. I'm new to this so any advise is appreciated, though I'm hoping for opinions from those who have used these drives and compared them.
 

fenderman

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Hello Ip Cam Talk,

I'm currently running 1 'rebranded' Hikvision ds-2cd2332-i, using Blue Iris on my desktop PC. I'm wanting to expand, probably 4 cams total near term, up to 8 cameras max, since the gigabit POE switches I'm looking at have 8 ports.

Leaning toward the Thinkserver ts140 with either raid 5 or 10 and using the WD 4TB drives.

The red and purple drives from WD are basically the same price. The purple is supposedly suited for video footage (fullframe)? The red seems slightly more durable(in theory?).

Any advise on which type of hard drive? Red v Purple. I'm new to this so any advise is appreciated, though I'm hoping for opinions from those who have used these drives and compared them.
Either drive will be fine..but for a dedicated rig, just go with the purple...not sure you need raid at all on an NVR system...the likelihood of failure is slim...if you must have hard drive redundancy then save some money and just do a raid 1 setup..
If you will be recording on motion only you dont need tons of space even for 8 cams ---though it does depend on the amount of activity your cams see...i can get one to two months on 1tb on some of my systems running 20-24mp (8 cams total) on a 1tb drive with some allocated to the OS..It really depends on where the system is placed...
What processor will the ts140 have?
 

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n3wb
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Hey fenderman thanks for replying.

I want to get the ts140 with the Intel Xeon E3-1225 v3 3.2GHz. I will look at raid 1. Not sure what my raid options are with the ts140, probably limited without card. Not too familiar with all the raids. I have only ever done 1 raid (0) on a desktop.

2-3 cams will be catching street activity as they will cover the off street parking(rental property). It's not a main street, but it is a 'collector' street that gets a fair amount of vehicle and pedestrian traffic.

Averaging <1~3 GB/day with the 1 cam running 3MP/15fps, depends on weather etc sometimes. Most days closer to 1+ GB. Nights with heavy fog/dew can cause lots of recording. Need a separate IR source, someday maybe.

I will get smaller drives 1-2 TB. I could see possibly setting 1-2 cams to record during certain times. Even with that 1-2 TB drives should be plenty I guess.
 

fenderman

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If you are going to go to 8 cams you might be better off with an i7 haswell system...the xeon benchmarks about the same as an i5...you will be able to handle 8 cams at 3mp but if you want more headroom then i7 would be the way to go...dell outlet 7020/9020 systems are my preference...
 

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n3wb
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i7 Haswell should be compatible upgrade for future with ts140. I will confirm though. What %cpu does the dedicated i-7 run with 8 cams on BI?

Some ts140 come with server 2012r2. Was considering running that.
 

fenderman

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i7 Haswell should be compatible upgrade for future with ts140. I will confirm though. What %cpu does the dedicated i-7 run with 8 cams on BI?

Some ts140 come with server 2012r2. Was considering running that.
Using BI3 and an i7-4770 at 15 and 20fps depending on the cams..8 cams (22mp total, two are running at 1080p) i have 17-22 percent usage...this is with the console up and the cameras displaying on a monitor..
 

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n3wb
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Ok thank you,that sounds good. I would be happy with 17-22% with 4 cams on the E3-1225 v3 for now. I have BI 4.0.1.14 x64 currently. ts140 will probably be headless for now, not sure how much less cpu that gets me or how much cpu RDP will cost me. The BI android app is nice for occasional viewing over wifi lan. Phone gets warm when running live view for extended periods though so I try not to. Haven't been able to get screencast to work yet.
 

fenderman

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Ok thank you,that sounds good. I would be happy with 17-22% with 4 cams on the E3-1225 v3 for now. I have BI 4.0.1.14 x64 currently. ts140 will probably be headless for now, not sure how much less cpu that gets me or how much cpu RDP will cost me. The BI android app is nice for occasional viewing over wifi lan. Phone gets warm when running live view for extended periods though so I try not to. Haven't been able to get screencast to work yet.
You can always use a cheap tablet if you like...or a fire tv/android pc running the BI app...in the past i have setup remote viewing through the home/business using hdmi over ethernet...there is no additional overhead other the the initial display...it is the most stable and reliable method..
 

bp2008

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With motion detection you can get away with just one drive. I'd go with a Purple just because this is what they are designed for. You can make it two drives mirrored if you are concerned about disk failure taking your recordings.

I recommend you do not set up Raid 5. I've set up 4 of those in the past. All were very slow, especially at writing. The first two survived and were retired after years of use. The third experienced a disk failure about 6 months ago but I was able to recover most of the data. Lost one DVD image because of a bad sector (which made Intel's RAID controller freak out and unmount the volume when it was encountered). The 4th RAID 5 array failed completely when one disk failed and another got marked as offline (the disk still works fine though). That was enough to put the entire array into a failed state and despite careful efforts I could not recover any data. Had to restore from backups. Always back things up!

I have 18 cams on motion detection, all 2MP or higher, and I have clips all the way back to September using only 134 GB. The secret to this is that I don't get a lot of motion events. My kitchen cam alone (which is not connected to Blue Iris, and records to an SD card instead) stores over 1 GB per day of motion clips.
 

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With motion detection you can get away with just one drive. I'd go with a Purple just because this is what they are designed for. You can make it two drives mirrored if you are concerned about disk failure taking your recordings.

I recommend you do not set up Raid 5. I've set up 4 of those in the past. All were very slow, especially at writing. The first two survived and were retired after years of use. The third experienced a disk failure about 6 months ago but I was able to recover most of the data. Lost one DVD image because of a bad sector (which made Intel's RAID controller freak out and unmount the volume when it was encountered). The 4th RAID 5 array failed completely when one disk failed and another got marked as offline (the disk still works fine though). That was enough to put the entire array into a failed state and despite careful efforts I could not recover any data. Had to restore from backups. Always back things up!

I have 18 cams on motion detection, all 2MP or higher, and I have clips all the way back to September using only 134 GB. The secret to this is that I don't get a lot of motion events. My kitchen cam alone (which is not connected to Blue Iris, and records to an SD card instead) stores over 1 GB per day of motion clips.
Is that a higher failure rate than normal? I'm using an SSD for storage, because that's all I have ATM. I can review recordings at 4x or faster. Which unfortunately is required due to some issues my tenants have been having with the neighbors :disturbed:. I just want to be able to get through the footage as fast as possible and have some measure of redundancy.
 
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code2

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Is that a higher failure rate than normal? I'm using an SSD for storage, because that's all I have ATM. I can review recordings at 4x or faster. Which unfortunately is required due to some issues my tenants have been having with the neighbors :disturbed:. I just want to be able to get through the footage as fast as possible and have some measure of redundancy.

I wouldn't be using SSD for writing you will burn them out rather fast. Remember ssd have a write life and cameras will chew thru it like nothing
 

fenderman

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I wouldn't be using SSD for writing you will burn them out rather fast. Remember ssd have a write life and cameras will chew thru it like nothing
Its not that bad Grueling endurance test blows away SSD durability fears | PCWorld
Unless you are recording 24/7 with lots of cams, an ssd can last for many many years...even at 24/7 it will run a few years depending on how many cams/bitrate....its just not a good idea economically as you can get much more storage with hdd...though i recommend ssd's for the boot/os drives...
 

chupakbra

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Ok thank you,that sounds good. I would be happy with 17-22% with 4 cams on the E3-1225 v3 for now. I have BI 4.0.1.14 x64 currently. ts140 will probably be headless for now, not sure how much less cpu that gets me or how much cpu RDP will cost me. The BI android app is nice for occasional viewing over wifi lan. Phone gets warm when running live view for extended periods though so I try not to. Haven't been able to get screencast to work yet.
Lockdown,

I'm running 8 cameras on TS140 with E3-1225v3 (6895 PassMark score). They are all set at 1080p motion triggered. With BI minimized the CPU load is around 40%. I did a test with 7 cameras triggered simultaneously and CPU peaked at 96%. I will need to add two more cameras.
I'm currently looking at TS440 with E3-1245v3 (9516 PassMark score) which is closer to the i7-4770 that @fenderman is talking about (10217 PassMark score). It's $450 normally on Amazon, but at one point it was sold for $370!

I currently have TS140 E3-1225v3 with 16GB ECC RAM (I normally use it for ESXi), 120GB SSD for Windows 7 and BlueIris 4, 2x1TB WD Blue Spanned drives. Cameras: 1xDS-2CD2532F-IWS, 2xDS-2CD2432F-IW (on their way from China), 3xDS-2CD2332-I, 4xDS-2CD2032-I and JGS524PE-100NAS switch.
 

fenderman

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Lockdown,

I'm running 8 cameras on TS140 with E3-1225v3 (6895 PassMark score). They are all set at 1080p motion triggered. With BI minimized the CPU load is around 40%. I did a test with 7 cameras triggered simultaneously and CPU peaked at 96%. I will need to add two more cameras.
I'm currently looking at TS440 with E3-1245v3 (9516 PassMark score) which is closer to the i7-4770 that @fenderman is talking about (10217 PassMark score). It's $450 normally on Amazon, but at one point it was sold for $370!

I currently have TS140 E3-1225v3 with 16GB ECC RAM (I normally use it for ESXi), 120GB SSD for Windows 7 and BlueIris 4, 2x1TB WD Blue Spanned drives. Cameras: 1xDS-2CD2532F-IWS, 2xDS-2CD2432F-IW (on their way from China), 3xDS-2CD2332-I, 4xDS-2CD2032-I and JGS524PE-100NAS switch.
Are you running the cameras direct to disk?
 

glenncol

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Lockdown,

I'm running 8 cameras on TS140 with E3-1225v3 (6895 PassMark score). They are all set at 1080p motion triggered. With BI minimized the CPU load is around 40%. I did a test with 7 cameras triggered simultaneously and CPU peaked at 96%. I will need to add two more cameras.
I'm currently looking at TS440 with E3-1245v3 (9516 PassMark score) which is closer to the i7-4770 that @fenderman is talking about (10217 PassMark score). It's $450 normally on Amazon, but at one point it was sold for $370!

I currently have TS140 E3-1225v3 with 16GB ECC RAM (I normally use it for ESXi), 120GB SSD for Windows 7 and BlueIris 4, 2x1TB WD Blue Spanned drives. Cameras: 1xDS-2CD2532F-IWS, 2xDS-2CD2432F-IW (on their way from China), 3xDS-2CD2332-I, 4xDS-2CD2032-I and JGS524PE-100NAS switch.
What is the power usage like?
 

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n3wb
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ThinkServer TS140 and TS440 motherboards with ME driver Firmware version earlier than 9.1.0.1120 (FRU 03T8874, 03T8873 and 03T8612) cannot support Intel Haswell Refresh CPU.

For TS440:
00FC658 motherboard can support both Haswell Refresh CPU and Haswell CPU
03T8874 motherboard can only support Haswell CPU
For TS140:
00FC657 and 00FC659 motherboard can support both Haswell Refresh CPU and Haswell CPU

03T8873 and 03T8612 motherboard can only support Haswell CPU

Its says there are supposed to be new 2015 TS 140's with 3 year warranties and better psu. 70A4006EUX/FUX/GUX. I guess those are the Haswell refresh? I don't see any 3rd party vendors selling them though. I'll probably just stick with the 2013 version.

I'm currently looking at TS440 with E3-1245v3 (9516 PassMark score) which is closer to the i7-4770 that @fenderman is talking about (10217 PassMark score). It's $450 normally on Amazon, but at one point it was sold for $370!
Yeah It seems I already missed the best deals, I've seen people mention some unbelievable prices from a few months ago.
 
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