Blue Iris - record direct to computer drive or NAS drive - or both

[saltwater]

Ok, I'll preface this with the fact that I do not yet have a NAS drive and have only started researching them. It appears it's a choice between Synology or QNAP and then either a two or four-bay unit.

I have only practised with Blue Iris with one camera, getting ready to move into a new house in two weeks. (I have wired for 17 locations, overkill, but will be 7 - 8 cameras to start with and work it out from there)

What are your thoughts regarding a NAS? Is it a viable (efficient & responsive) option to use the NAS as the direct recording drive for Blue Iris? I do like the fact that I could set up a NAS so that a copy of the data is automatically retained and drives can be swapped out if they fail, hopefully not both of them at the same time.

Or would it be preferable to record directly to the internal hard drive of the Blue Iris computer? If doing this, I assume it's possible to, in real time, backup or copy the data to the NAS but then the Blue Iris computer must work a little bit harder.

Any thoughts?

 

[kenneth4343]

Go for Synology. More stable regarding to my experience

 

[SouthernYankee]

I do both. I record directly to a local drive on the BI PC. I use the BI clone cameras to write to a Network drive. So i have two copies of each camera video. I use direct to disk with continuous recording.

Create a clone camera

This post is for how to create a clone camera for backing up a cameras video. There are four parts of setting up a clone camera for backup 1) Create a video storage location for the clone camera 2) copy an original camera to create a clone. 3) modify the clone camera to reduce system load 4)...

ipcamtalk.com

 

[saltwater]

Thanks for the info and I'll investigate the 'Create a clone camera' feature more so. I did give it a read and no doubt I'll go back to it when I start setting things up.

If not recording direct to the Blue Iris computer internal drive but only to the NAS drive, is there a noticeable performance hit when viewing your cameras live and general browsing of historical clips? If so, I suppose this then dictates a minimum specification for a type of NAS drive. Some of the models I've noticed that aggregation can occur, using two cables thus doubling throughput to 2 GBs. Should these models be considered for Blue Iris purposes?

ps. Overnight I ordered a HP ProDesk 600 G3 SFF i7-7700 8gb RAM and 256 Gb SSD, Win 10 Pro, to be used solely for Blue Iris.

 

[AP514]

I am doing Direct to disk..with 3-12TB Drives (Shucked external from Bestbuy)
2-Drives in raid..the 3rd is the back up...once I get all the planned cams in I figure 25-30 days 24/7 recording then will be backed up to the 3rd drive.

Still working on the amount of space used on the Raids before I back up to 3rd drive...I was thinking some every so many 100's MB so my poor CPU would not have to
Kill its self transferring Terra-bits at a time.

 

[saltwater]

I am doing Direct to disk..with 3-12TB Drives (Shucked external from Bestbuy)
2-Drives in raid..the 3rd is the back up...once I get all the planned cams in I figure 25-30 days 24/7 recording then will be backed up to the 3rd drive.

Still working on the amount of space used on the Raids before I back up to 3rd drive...I was thinking some every so many 100's MB so my poor CPU would not have to
Kill its self transferring Terra-bits at a time.

Forgive my ignorance are you saving, writing, direct to disk in the NAS? I'm not familiar with the term 'Shucked' no doubt a Google search should reveal all.

 

[Mike A.]

...I'm not familiar with the term 'Shucked' no doubt a Google search should reveal all.

Removed from one of the external USB-connected drives that they sell vs bought as a stand-alone drive.

For whatever reason, quite a bit less expensive that way for effectively the same drives.

 

[samplenhold]

I like to keep things simple. I have three WD 10TB Purple drives in my BI machine. I split the 18 cams over the three drives. Record direct-to-disk 24/7. All three drives are set to delete as needed. I have a QNAP NAS for the last 8-9 years or so.

If you have the NAS be the storage, then you have two machines handling your cam data at the same time. BI gets the feeds, checks for motion etc, and passed the data to the NAS that then has to handle it to write it to the drives. Why handle the data twice? Now as the data is being written, you decide to review a recording. So BI has to ask the NAS for the data, the NAS has to read it and send it to the BI machine which then has to display it all while both units are still writing the new recordings. This is also done over your home LAN. Why do all of that?

I also see no reason to backup my cam videos. I get 32 days of recordings on the 30TB of drives. If I have not seen a need to use a clip within 32 days, I doubt it is important enough to have a backup. On clips I identify that I need to keep, I just copy it to the NAS as needed.

 

[SouthernYankee]

The backup for the BI data is for when the BI system fails during a break in. Yes I am paranoid I built the backup at no cost as i had all the stuff laying around.

 

[samplenhold]

The backup for the BI data is for when the BI system fails during a break in.

Yeah, that would suck. And the only way to have that work is to do it the way you are doing it. Having BI do it from the BI Server to a NAS at some point in time, or running a backup program or script that does it periodically, would be worthless in this case. I am relying, maybe erroneously, on the SD cards in each cam for that issue.

 

[SouthernYankee]

As I said I am paranoid. I use the SD cards in the cameras that support them. Even good quality SD cards fail after a while in a video application in the Texas heat. Mine last about a year.

 

[AP514]

Hum.... Good to know about the SD card DEATHs...I might just Pass on them and save the money.

 

[tech191]

I'm sorry to bring back this old thread, but I find myself in a similar situation. I have a Sinology 1019+ (5 drives) and have been using Surveillance Station for 4 cameras. I record everything on 2 WD Purple drives in RAID 1, for redundancy. I've just built a BI server and I'm getting ready to purchase 11 cameras. I wanted to continue to use the Sinology for video data storage on the Purples (along with the other 3 drives that I use for non-surveillance purposes). So just like the OP, I was hoping to use the BI system for processing, motion detection etc and the Sinology for storage. I understand that you now have data moving back and forth but is it noticeable? Is it truly an issue? @saltwater did you end up doing this and if so, what were your results? I'm just trying to make the best decision and at this point, I would not be spending any money because I have both the BI system and the 1019+. Thank you!

 

[SouthernYankee]

The biggest problem with a NAS is that a NAS is designed to write a large file once and read it multiple times. BI program will be writing records for multiple cameras simultaneously, continuously, this will caused a high load on a NAS. I use a very simple NAS one drive as a short term realtime video backup for BI.

Originally i used a internal raid 1 on my bi PC. One of the drives failed, it took 3 days for the recovery to run, as the other drive was running continuously add/deleting video files.

Test do not guess.

 

[saltwater]

@saltwater did you end up doing this and if so, what were your results? I'm just trying to make the best decision and at this point, I would not be spending any money because I have both the BI system and the 1019+. Thank you!

No NAS yet. I'm now running 11 cameras recording direct to disk on WD 8TB drive and I get about 22 days. I'm still considering a NAS though haven't decided on a brand or model just yet or how I'll configure it with Blue Iris. I may end up doing what @SouthernYankee suggested at the top of this thread, clone the cameras.

 

[Holbs]

and keep in mind... live video feeds and direct-to-disk across vlan subnets may tax your router pretty good. Even with my Ubiquiti UDM router, there were slight irritating delays when opening a camera and populating the alert list on UI3. Granted, I had 15+ camera's direct-to-disk recording of main streams 24/7 .This was when I had all recordings landing in my Synology NAS on a different subnet. Have upgraded my Blue Iris machine to have a 8TB Western Digital Purple be local instead of in the NAS.

 

[tech191]

Thank you for the feedback! I'm running multiple switches and vlans on my network and the traffic between BI and the NAS would only be affecting one. But all the points you guys have made stand and I'm likely going to handle it that way. Thank you!