Change recording location to NAS

[Sean313]

Has anyone ever setup up recording directly from blue iris to a network attached storage device? The day has come where I am running out of space (currently have 6TB). I currently have approximately 23 cameras running and am about to add on 8 more cameras. Thought process is I can do raid with the NAS and get something with hot swappable hard drives so as things fail (hopefully never) or need more storage I can upgrade the disks fairly easily.

I tested it with a small WD NAS that I already have with one of the cameras and it seemed fine.

Network is all gigabit with fiber between switches so I don’t think that will be an issue.


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[Tuckerdude]

Hey Sean313...

I've not used NAS, so can't really help there...and I can see SOME benefits, however in my experience running Blue Iris for the past 4 years I've never had an issue with HD's failing. Not to say that it can't happen, because it certainly can but my suggestion would be to add local storage in the 10GB range and just raid array them if you are really concerned about redundancy. Out of curiosity...how long do you tend to keep your recordings? I've got 34 cameras and never come close to running out of space on my internals HD's.

Btw...Super jealous about you having fiber between switches! I would kill for that!!! Is not about the cost, it's about getting the cables from one side of my house to the other. I've snaked A WHOLE LOT OF WIRE in my time (under crawlspace, up in the attic), but the one run that I'd really like to have be fiber there is simply no (clean) way to do it without taking the cable outside of the house and coming back in at some point on the other end.

 

[nejakejnick]

I have been recording to NAS for ~2,5 years. The performance is not that good, but the only real problem is packet loss - at least for me as I use 130m long cat5e cable (the standard allows only 100m), which not every switch can handle somehow reliably while using 1Gbps. The best for me would to add a switch in the middle powered by POE...

One time after a Netgear switch died I was using a TP-LINK instead, and it had a small packet loss, resulting in some write errors, nothing serious. But one time I was unable to start BI, it just crashed after few seconds. I tried deleting some new recordings and that fixed it

 

[Sean313]

Hey Sean313...

I've not used NAS, so can't really help there...and I can see SOME benefits, however in my experience running Blue Iris for the past 4 years I've never had an issue with HD's failing. Not to say that it can't happen, because it certainly can but my suggestion would be to add local storage in the 10GB range and just raid array them if you are really concerned about redundancy. Out of curiosity...how long do you tend to keep your recordings? I've got 34 cameras and never come close to running out of space on my internals HD's.

Btw...Super jealous about you having fiber between switches! I would kill for that!!! Is not about the cost, it's about getting the cables from one side of my house to the other. I've snaked A WHOLE LOT OF WIRE in my time (under crawlspace, up in the attic), but the one run that I'd really like to have be fiber there is simply no (clean) way to do it without taking the cable outside of the house and coming back in at some point on the other end.

There is about 10 cameras that I need to keep 7-8 months worth of video (remote vacation rental that’s only occupied 3-4 months a year). I have all cameras set to record only during motion but it’s still a lot. I currently only get about 5 months with all the cameras.


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[revo]

If you're having performance issues writing directly to a NAS it could mean a few things. If the disk is all HDD, no SSD which I get can be cost prohibitive but QNAP for instance has 5 year old NAS units capable of leveraging a single SSD for R/W cache with newer firmware. Another is your network - you want gigabit or better, again whatever you can afford. I've got a netgear nighthawk aggregating two ports into my QNAP NAS which is also teaming 2 NICs. A secondary NAS built on Windows Server with dual Intel gigabit NICs serving NFS which is cheaper to roll. What you could do is set up a scheduled task on your BI server - have initial recordings sent to the local drive on the BI server, then copy over to the NAS. Set the task to also delete files in the directory you're copying from when the task is complete.