Hi
@chinklop
There are several approaches I would consider for a system with such heavy storage requirements,
Plan A: Reduce the load
Use lower bit rates. VBR encoding can help but it makes your storage consumption less predictable.
By reducing bit rates you lose image quality. You can regain some of the lost image quality by:
* Reducing the frame rates
* Use H.265 encoding (this does mean you can't use Intel hardware acceleration)
* Increasing the iframe interval. I would not recommend setting it higher than 4 times the frame rate, as higher values do inhibit seeking performance.
As an alternative to reducing the bit rates across the board, what about recording low-bit-rate sub streams continuously while you record the main streams only on motion detect?
If you can reduce the load to the point it will fit on only one or two large hard drives, you've greatly reduced the cost and complexity of the system.
Plan B: Use separate disks
This is basically what
@SouthernYankee recommended. Just configure BI to record specific cameras to specific drives.
Blue Iris will let you configure up to 9 recording folders I believe, and each of them can be on a different hard drive. Don't use any kind of RAID or storage pooling -- it is really easy to screw up and make the situation worse in the event of disk failure.
Plan C: Build a robust and performant storage system
If none of the above is suitable and your customer requires better protection from disk failure, then you've got to build it right. RAID 5 is not even a part of the right solution.
I would honestly consider setting up a NAS running FreeNAS or Unraid, with the goal of using this as a hypervisor to run the VMS software (Blue Iris or something else) in a virtual machine on the NAS itself. I'd put in a strong Xeon or EPYC CPU and 32-64 GB of ECC memory. By running the VMS in a virtual machine on the NAS itself you should be able to map your huge storage volume to the VM without having to mount it as a network volume, and this should improve I/O performance and reliability. For the storage I would use a bunch of WD purple or Seagate Skyhawk drives (maybe even a combination of both) and configure them as a single volume using RAID-Z2 or RAID-Z3.
