Buying hardware

dohat leku

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I'm looking on ebay for systems but not able to find any that fit 4+ HDD's. I want to store 1 month of video and will have 8 2MP cameras, possibly one more 4MP camera
Choosing Hardware for Blue Iris | IP Cam Talk

Can anybody share some links or model numbers of PC's that will fit 4+ 8Tb HDD's. I can possibly stand up a NAS too but that's adding one more piece of hardware to manage and additional power consumption on top of that. My budget is $800 and I also plan to use that Blue iris as my primary PC (Basic tasks like Chrome, Outlook though i do open 20 chrome windows so perhaps need 16gb RAM)

Thx
 

fenderman

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guys

I'm looking on ebay for systems but not able to find any that fit 4+ HDD's. I want to store 1 month of video and will have 8 2MP cameras, possibly one more 4MP camera
Choosing Hardware for Blue Iris | IP Cam Talk

Can anybody share some links or model numbers of PC's that will fit 4+ 8Tb HDD's. I can possibly stand up a NAS too but that's adding one more piece of hardware to manage and additional power consumption on top of that. My budget is $800 and I also plan to use that Blue iris as my primary PC (Basic tasks like Chrome, Outlook though i do open 20 chrome windows so perhaps need 16gb RAM)

Thx
The PC should be dedicated to blue Iris, otherwise it's a recipe for disaster. You have a light load, there are some Dell an HP mini servers that are cheap that have modern processors supporting quick sync.
 

dohat leku

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Ok if I'm dedicating to blue iris, I'll rather spend under $400 for the PC's and of course I will have to spend more for the additional hard drives
 

dohat leku

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so you think I should budget more? Is anybody selling their old blue iris pc that I can just add more HDD's to?
 

fenderman

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so you think I should budget more? Is anybody selling their old blue iris pc that I can just add more HDD's to?
Less, you have a relatively low load. they have sales on those modern mini servers all the time. Just ensure that it has a modern processor equivalent to a 3rd or 4th generation i5 and supports quick sync
 

dohat leku

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many forums are discussing HDD limitations when going over 2TB in size
 

SouthernYankee

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dohat leku

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Can someone help me how to compute MP/s? Is that megapixel per second? Let’s assume eight 2MP cameras at 15fps

Thx
 

dohat leku

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Can someone help me how to compute MP/s? Is that megapixel per second? Let’s assume eight 2MP cameras at 15fps

Thx
 

SouthernYankee

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The calculator link is provided in the previous MBytes/sec. The megapixels depends on the make up of the picture, frame rate, frame size, compression, Iframe value.....
 

ICUatnight

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I bought one of these for about $280 shipped last week.. it’ll support two 3.5” drives + the board has a slot for an m2 nvme /ssd drive for fast booting. I did have to buy a win10 license for mine, but that was an additional $1.24.

HP Z240 SFF Workstation Intel Core i7-6700 @ 3.40GHz -32gb ram no HDD NO OS. WW | eBay

The i7-6700 supports hardware acceleration, which should help give it some added headroom over a 4th gen i7, and the link posted has 32gigs of ram, which is way more than necessary. The same seller has some with 16gigs of ram for a few bucks less. The one I received was super clean & still has a year of warranty left (probably).. ymmv..

Check out this link for an idea of how many cams people are running on this processor..

Blue Iris Update Helper
 
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dohat leku

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SouthernYankee

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I would go for the second one as the CPU is a little fast (look at passmark for cpu ratings). I really do not know what refurbished does., vacumn out the dust and install a new OS.
 

dohat leku

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Great - next step is the 1st HDD. WD Purple 8Tb both 7200 and 5400rpm are same price on amazon - which one would you go for?
Outside of this, I assume I just have to buy the blue iris software and get started

Thx
 

bp2008

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I'd get the lower RPM. Less noise, heat, and power consumption that way. In theory. What little speed difference there is won't matter.
 

bp2008

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Can someone help me how to compute MP/s? Is that megapixel per second? Let’s assume eight 2MP cameras at 15fps
That is about 250 MP/s. So the i5 CPUs from above are fine, even a little bit overkill being 6th gen (3rd gen could be as little as 1/2 the price for nearly the same performance).

I entered 2 MP, 15 FPS, 8 cameras into this calculator: Calculating Required Hard Drive Size | IP Cam Talk

upload_2019-9-9_17-9-40.png

It shows you will likely fit about 27-28 days on one 8 TB hard drive if your average bit rate per camera is 3 Mbps. If you carefully tune VBR (variable bit rate) encoding in the camera's web interface, and use Direct to Disk in Blue Iris, you could extend that even further with little apparent quality loss by having the cameras normally run below 3 Mbps but with the ability to temporarily use higher bit rates when the need arises.
 

dohat leku

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How big do you expect the clips database to get with 8 cameras - I've read that it's recommended to store that on the SSD. Anything else blue iris related to store on the SSD or I can install everything else on the 8TB HDD? I'm also open to buying another 500gb NVME if required - it's about $65 on amazon
 
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