Advice needed on running BI on an intel NUC

[Madan Sudhindra]

Hello All !

I am looking to replace my sff BlurIris pc with something more powerful.

Today, I have 6 Hikvision and Lorex cameras feeding H.265 video streams into BluIris. The cameras are set to record 24x7 with Direct to Disk recording to optimize performance.

I am looking to see if the intel nuc form factor pc would be a good candidate to run BlueIris in my environment.
Specifically, I am looking at the minisforum NPB5

Minisforum NAB6/NAB9/NAB6 Lite

Starting with the Intel solution, Minisforum NPB7 features a 13th Gen Raptor Lake CPU i7-13700H with Dual Gigabit Ethernet and Dual USB4 Ports. Another variant is the NAB6 equipped with the Intel Core™ i7-12650H processor.

store.minisforum.com

I would kit this out with 16gb RAM, and a 1 TB drive, with recordings being stored on an 8 TB USB3 disk.

Does anyone here have experience on running BI on platforms like this, and is willing to share their experience and issues they ran into ?
This is a home based setup.

Thanks !

 

[fenderman]

You're overpaying and reducing storage capability by using a tiny nuc... You're not saving any money... Look at a more powerful sff...

 

[Smilingreen]

There are other options to use if you are looking for a SFF. I picked up a Lenovo SFF pc on flea-bay for $75 and then added a 2 gig hard drive and maxed out the memory. It runs my 6 cameras no problem. But. I live in the woods in a rural area, so I am more interested in capturing wild life around me than I am the absence of criminals. I only record on camera trigger. Depends on where you live and what your security needs are.

 

[looney2ns]

You will have problems using USB for the storage drive. USB can't keep up with the continuous stream.
The HP Elitedesk SFF I5-8500 (and Up) machines have proven to be great BI servers.
Or A SFF Dell Optiplex with an I5-8500 (and up) works well too, if you can live with only room for one Hard drive.
Example Dell
Example Elitedesk

 

[sdkid]

You will have problems using USB for the storage drive. USB can't keep up with the continuous stream.
The HP Elitedesk SFF I5-8500 (and Up) machines have proven to be great BI servers.
Or A SFF Dell Optiplex with an I5-8500 (and up) works well too, if you can live with only room for one Hard drive.
Example Dell
Example Elitedesk

I can hardly believe that Elitedesk price--- awesome. If my old I-5 4th gen was struggling, I'd be all over that one!

 

[looney2ns]

I can hardly believe that Elitedesk price--- awesome. If my old I-5 4th gen was struggling, I'd be all over that one!

Yeah, prices on the I5-8500's have been on a decline the past couple of months.
I saw an i7-10700 for $379 today.

 

[The Profit]

I have also been looking into a dedicated PC for BI and would also like to add one of the object detection softwares. I have 7 cameras at the moment.

If I were to get one of the above suggested SFF PC’s, would I need to be able to add on an additional graphics card to use the AI object detection? Or would the Intel graphics card on the mother board be sufficient?

Is there a different PC suggesting for the above setup?

Thank you for any help!


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

[Michael Graves]

I have BI running on an ancient recycled desktop (AMD FX-6100). Would like to transition to something a bit newer and smaller. I appreciate that USB-attached storage in unwise.

The Lenovo ThinkCentre M720q Tiny appears to be the last generation of their uSFF platform that accepted a standard 2.5" SATA drive and an M.2 PCIe SSD.

I'm looking a refurb with an i5-8400T & 16 GB RAM. This is quite appealing since it would support the SSD for the OS and a 2.5" disk for media storage.

Opinions? Anyone use such uSFF hardware for BI?

 

[Smilingreen]

Yep. Running 7 cameras. Works fine.

 

[Michael Graves]

Just finished migrating my BI setup to a Lenovo M910q Tiny. Took a little longer than I thought. The reseller shipped with with a 2.5" SATA boot drive. I cloned that to a new NVMe boot disk.

I had a spare 2.5" Seagate Momentus XT 750 GB disk on hand for media storage. However, it's a 9mm thick disk that didn't quite fit in the HD sled. It would not settle into all four of the pins that hold it in place in the drive sled. It seems this plastic drive sled was intended to take 7mm drives, which are mostly SATA SSDs in 2.5" form factor.

I had to remove two of the pins on one side, and used a nylon tie wrap to lash that side into place. All good in the end.

This one (i7-6700) cruises along at about 12% CPU where the old one averaged 50%. The web ui is a lot snappier.

What's the story on using SSDs for media storage? I thought HD were still longer lived in heavy write applications.

 

[Starglow]

SSD drives have faster read/write speeds than HDD's and are more reliable than they used to be. My Lorex NVR system records 24/7 and is set to overwrite when the storage is full which happens about every 1.5 weeks. It has HDD's (10TB total) that are designed for security surveillance applications, but my NUC has both HDD & SSD drives however I'm not using it for storage right now. I was playing around with BI on the NUC but the trial period expired. Not sure what I'm going to do with it next.