Blue Iris Hardware ~ 35 Cameras

ptech

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First of all, would Blue Iris be capable or do even recommend a Blue Iris setup with this many cameras?

Looking at using the following cameras.

4.1MP - CMIP3142-28S x 30
4.1MP - CMIP1142W-28 x 4
2.1MP - PTZIP762X20IR x 1

Hardware suggestions appreciated.
 

looney2ns

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HP Elite desktop with an I7-6700 Intel Cpu, at least 8gb of ram.
SSD for BI and Win 10Pro, and Western Digital Purple Hard drives for video.
BI can handle up to 64 cams.
 

komokoro

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I am running core i5 6600k. 15 pcs 1080p@20fps and 15 pcs 720@20fps. CPU usange is 90-100% and very slaggish now. Everything is Direct2Disk and Intel QuicSync is checked. I have an nvidia 730 GPU that helps during RDP and native viewing. But it does nothing to help in decoding the stream.

My company is planning to add 10 or more so cameras soon. Hopefully Intel will release the 6-core i7 sometime this year before this computer crash!!!!!.


Blueiris is very capable but it needs to work on how to utilize NVIDIA and ATI gpu.
 

hmjgriffon

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HP Elite desktop with an I7-6700 Intel Cpu, at least 8gb of ram.
SSD for BI and Win 10Pro, and Western Digital Purple Hard drives for video.
BI can handle up to 64 cams.
I'd be curious to see if it can handle 35 4MP cameras though.
 

tf9623

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I'd bump up the RAM too - you can never have too much RAM, NVMe, or money - that's the rule :) I know they say you don't need it but RAM is cheap - especially DDR4 - if you use a 6th gen i7 then you will probably need DDR4. I just got two sticks of Crucial 16GB (32GB total) for 71.00 each on a promo code a Fry's.. I put it in a drawer because I'll need it for my next project..

One other suggestion - be sure and get "enterprise" or "Pro" SSD. The difference is the amount of writes they are warrantied for. It you get say a Samsung Evo versus Pro SSD you'll notice in the fine print that the warranty is for x years or xx TB written - whichever comes first - just like a car. I know people will argue that you'll never ever fill up say 75TB or whatever the consumer-grade warranty SSD is but the reason it is cheaper and warrantied for less time is because it isn't mean for enterprise class storage and BI is always reading and writing - always.

I would say have NVMe/SSD as your boot and Blue Iris program drive, put a second NVMe or SSD as your primary (1st and/or second level) Blue Iris storage but leave room for a full image backup of your C: drive using the "Windows 7 Backup and Restore" on Windows 10. Say you have a 128 or 256 as your boot/program (Blue Iris) drive. Put your data starting on the second drive (D:) (say 512GB) but only use about half. That way you can schedule weekly full backups using Windows 10 "Windows 7 Backup and Restore - don't ask" and make an image of C: as part of that. Write a script or manually export your registry, don't do auto updates. You can use spindles for second or third level storage or NAS.

That way recent events are always fast fast fast when you view them and all of that is in one box. You can back it up fast. To be really safe you should backup to a separate drive or just write a script to copy the backup to the fast media over to the slower media or do both.

Now there's all kinds of ways to do it - this is just the way I chose to do it - and maybe it isn't ideal and I'll figure that out but for now I'm very happy with it and I've got something like 4TB online which gives me around 21 days. I've got about 16 or so cameras, mostly 1920x1080, some 4MP, all h264, all direct encoding, and all at 6 fps. YMMV. As of yesterday I've upgraded from 256/512 as my primary/secondary SATA SSD on a 5th Gen i7 with 16GB to 512/1024 NVMe on a 6th gen i7 with 32GB. I know it is overkill but I went from 30-40% constant CPU peaking to 50-60 to 9-15% CPU (no bs) with the same config - exported the registry as-is into the new box. Plenty of room for growth and snappier response. It was fine before but when I get over 30% CPU in any situation I start looking for ways to improve things.

Just two cents..
 

hmjgriffon

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pretty much any SSD unless it's a garbage one will last you enough years to be outdated by the time it die, they definately are not going to die in 2 years from recording camera footage on them. As long as the OS you run it with has TRIM support you'll be fine.
 
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