Desktop Drive for BI Stored Folder?

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mattp

Getting comfortable
Mar 18, 2022
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Louisiana
I have a desktop drive that I added to the BI computer. I understand that constant writing will end up shortening the life of the drive, but how long should I expect it to last? Is there any real difference between the constant writing to the New folder and how BI moves files to the Stored folder (probably not b/c Purple drives are rated in TB per year...)?

The reason I did this was I upgraded the HD in a NAS and rather than give away or throw away the old HD, I figured I could add it as the Stored folder for BI and get that much more archived footage until it fails one day...It's extra weeks of footage that I wouldn't have otherwise at no real cost.
 
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mattp said:
I have a desktop drive that I added to the BI computer. I understand that constant writing will end up shortening the life of the drive, but how long should I expect it to last? Is there any real difference between the constant writing to the New folder and how BI moves files to the Stored folder (probably not b/c Purple drives are rated in TB per year...)?

The reason I did this was I upgraded the HD in a NAS and rather than give away or throw away the old HD, I figured I could add it as the Stored folder for BI and get that much more archived footage until it fails one day...It's extra weeks of footage that I wouldn't have otherwise at no real cost.
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It will be just fine. Its anyone's guess. I have many drives that shipped with HP or Dell pc's that have been recording video for 8+ years.
 
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I've got various non-purple drives working no problem. Some have moved from desktop to NAS to desktop to BI no problem. Any drive can fail. Obviously these drives in this case are not optimal for BI duty, but BI has a good storage management system so you can decide how the drive will be used in a "cascade" of multiple drives if you want to -- New - Stored - Aux 1 - Aux XX and so forth. You can control how much work the drives are doing based on plenty of options in the Settings > Storage tab, and some control on a per-camera basis as well, etc... The whole system is very flexible, so you have granular control over your files. Set it up how you need to.
 
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IAmATeaf said:
If both New and Stored drives are in the same PC then don’t waste resources moving clips around, set the cams to write video directly to the drives.
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I guess what my thoughts were is that the purple drives are "designed" for continuous writing. This is what's happening in the New folder. Whereas in the Stored folder BI is just moving the files there periodically. There's probably not much difference between performance requirements, and from others' input it appears I shouldn't have a problem.

To your point in your post, the only moving of files is what I had to do last night and that was to move the files in Stored on the existing drive to the new location on the new drive. I didn't have to do that, but figured why not keep those 2 weeks of videos to be accessible by BI.

Now it's set that BI will use the New folder on the existing drive and I'll get something like 30 days backlog in that folder (New) and with the new drive (Stored) I'll get another 30 days. So, I can now go back 2 months if needed.
 
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Yes but if the drives are in the same desktop you are simply moving files from one drive to the other.

You’d get the same 2 months by writing the clips directly to the drives.

In my rig I have 2 drives, I’ve split the cams so that half write to one drive and the rest to the other. Where I have 2 cams overlooking the same area, so for example my driveway, I have one writing to one drive and the other to the other.

This way I’m not moving any files around and if one drive dies then at least I’ve got the clips from the other.
 
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+1 on not moving files around!

BI can keep track of everything in the NEW folder. Most of us here have everything in NEW and do not use STORED. I have months of video and my playback is fine.

It is a waste of CPU% and wears out the HDD faster if you are constantly moving the volume of video files created from NEW to STORED on two HDD in the same computer. It just doesn't make sense. Inevitably it will also slow down trying to watch stuff if file moving is happening during that time.

And with two HDD in the computer, it doesn't make sense to have NEW on one and STORED on the other.

Best practice would be to split your cameras on the two drives and simply have a NEW on each drive.

So simple case you have 8 cameras (2 on each side of the house). You put one from each side of the house onto each drive. That way if one drive poops out you don't lose full coverage of a side of the house.

The only time it makes sense to use the STORED folder is if you are moving files to a NAS.
 
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BI is flexible enough to cover a lot of different scenarios, preferences, and use cases, and your needs might be different than someone else. I personally really appreciate that they designed it with such flexibility.

In my case -- currently -- some cameras are less important than others, and I'd prefer those to be written to my "inferior" consumer hard drive. If it dies, I'm not going to stress about it, and I can toss in another one if needed. It's been fine so far.

But some cameras are critical to me, and those get written to "the best" hard drive (a nice enterprise-class drive with low hours I pulled from my NAS), PLUS some of those files get backed up separately to another server, PLUS some of those files even get rsynced to yet another server off site (similar to 3-2-1 backup strategy). Again, those are critical files to me, so I don't treat them differently than other critical files I have.

And then some cameras are only recording when motion is detected to save space, but for the heck of it, I want longer-term retention for those clips, so I have them cascade to different folders/drives as needed.

So I definitely make use of several of the BI storage flexibility options, and it's great.

And sometimes I like switching things around for various reasons that might not matter to someone else.

So what I do might seem crazy to someone else. But it works great for me. Who knows, I might switch to a basic two-drive config next month. But I like what this config gives me, and it actually works without a headache thanks to the folks at BI.

It's just whatever you want IMO. But I totally understand someone following the other approaches in this thread... if that works best for you, go for it.
 
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