Clips and Archiving - Multiple Hard Drives Question

R

Rich.L

Getting the hang of it
Aug 6, 2019
55
43
VA
I just received an 8TB WD Purple drive and I am wondering if there is a preferred position in the cascading file structure in BI (or any other reason) for a specific order?

ie. Should I plug the 8TB in at the end of the structure (AUX 4) or make it my New/AUX1 drive?

My current archive structure with three 4TB WD Purple drives
NEW - D:\New (1 Hour)
AUX 1 - D:\Short Term Archive (7 Days)
AUX 2 - E:\Mid Term Archive (14 Days)
AUX 3 - F:\Long Term Archive (21 Days)

If it matters my current setup is
5 - IPC-B5442-ZE (waiting on 3 more I just bout from Andy)
3 - IPC-T5442TM-AS 3.6mm
Continuous recording
 
So you move clips around the local drives?

To me moving clips around local drives is just a waste of time and waste of resources so I tend not to do that and just let BI manage the free space with no age limit and then set the cameras to write to one drive or the other.
 
IAmATeaf said:
So you move clips around the local drives?

To me moving clips around local drives is just a waste of time and waste of resources so I tend not to do that and just let BI manage the free space with no age limit and then set the cameras to write to one drive or the other.
Click to expand...

Yes. I am not really a fan of it. My OCD would prefer a single drive/partition per camera.

So you use the camera settings and point each camera to a specific folder (AUX1, AUX2, etc)?
 
I would take a completely different approach.

DO not use time to determine recording use space.

Divide the cameras equally between the three drives, based upon space the cameras use.. So hypothetically it would be 3 cameras on 2 drives and 4 cameras on one drive. So there is no movement between drives . You reduce the write load of the system by a lot. This reduces wear on the drives.

Always leave 5-10% free space on drives, That is not allocated to BI.
if using continuous recording on the BI camera settings, record tab, set the combine and cut video to 1 hour or 3 GB.

Advanced storage:
If you are using a complete disk for large video file storage (BVR) continuous recording, I recommend formatting the disk, with a windows cluster size of 1024K (1 Megabyte). This is a increase from the 4K default. This will reduce the physical number of disk write, decrease the disk fragmentation, speed up access.

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@Rich.L
your approach does not work after you get over 9 drives, you run out of folders,.
 
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Yes, I split the cameras equally between the drives and let BI managed the space in the drive itself and disable the age option, this way you keeps clips until they have to deleted to free up space for the next clip.
 
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Thanks for the input. I will look at the settings and readjust to see how performance goes.
 
I put in the new HDD and re-configured the recording settings. I will check it tomorrow to see how its going.

I also got the 3 new cameras from Andy today.
 
I got it set up and it seems to be working. I initially forgot to change the file size limitation on the drives so I was a bit confused this morning when I saw that each drive only had a few files on them.

I have one additional hard drive coming in and I need to get the 3 new cameras installed this weekend.
 
I have been running for 7 days with 5 storage drives supporting 11 cameras continuously recording.

My CPU utilization with 8 cameras and 3-4 HDD's was bouncing between 20-30%. With 11 cameras and 8 5 HDD's I am bouncing between 40-50% CPU utilization and around 3.8G RAM.
 
Last edited:
So you have eight 4MP cams, each writing to their own 8TB drive? Why so many drives? That's 64 TB. Are they all internal? So you have a motherboard that has 8 SATA ports?

What processor do you have?

What FPS are the cams recording at? What bit rate? Are they all recording direct-to-disk? Ae you using HA?

If you go to the status report in BI, Camera tab, what are the Totals at the bottom left, kB/s and MP/s?

Have you turned off the moving of files?
 
I made a typo......I have 5 internal storage drives. M/B has 6 SATA ports.
M.2_1 - 256G
M.2_2 - Disabled to support 6 SATA drives
3 - 4TB
1 - 8TB
1 - 2TB

I just realized when reading your post that I forgot to adjust the bitrate, FPS, I-frame and disable the audio stream for the last 3 cameras I installed. I was teaching my son how to work with my networking gear and totally forgot to do that.
Doing that, CPU utilization went to 30%.

The CPU is an i7-9700k. FPS is 15 and bitrate is 8192Kb/s. Totals are 12100Kb/s and 675 MP/s. Moving files is turned off.
 
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