Drive upgrade procedure

One has to decide just how much video one wants to keep. That is totally up to you. In over two years of messing with cams, I have yet to try and find video that I no longer have stored.

With 23 cams recording 24/7 onto 3 x10TB drives, I get about 18-22 days of video depending on which drive you check. I would LIKE another week or two, but my machine is HDD maxed out and I am not going to swap the 10TB drives for 12TB drives and through them away. Maybe some day I will figure out a way to put in a fourth drive. But I do have more cams to install so there is an incentive for me to work this. Maybe get a bigger case?
 
I review everything every morning, UI3 with animated gifs, makes that really easy. When I do that I'm looking for things around our house and don't really pay attention to what the neighbors have going on. It's not my intention to watch them in the first place. It did show me that things can be missed and my original "spec" was to have two weeks of video available for a variety of reasons. Adding more cameras cut that down to the point of a little less than a weeks worth being available so the increase in disk space was inevitable anyway.

@samplenhold My case supports up to 12 drives and the mobo supports up to six. Actually I guess I could stuff in another four in the unused bays for CD ROM drives in the front for a total of 16. That is one advantage repurposing a self-built desktop rather than buying a used business class machine.
 
Make a 2nd Blue Iris machine? (
No. But this thread has got me looking into more drives.

I have two SATA 6Gb/s ports available. I also have two USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-A on the back plane available. But I have no room in the case for another HDD. I really do not want to go with a different case (buying a bigger case and transferring the internals). Was thinking of some kind of external HDD case that would either hook up to the SATA MB connectors (and powered by the current PS), or and external HDD case that would use the USB 3.1 Gen2 connector. Have to look into it more.

Wish I had a 3D printer! Could just print an appropriate case.
 
The old seemingly outdated DVR with a 21 day capacity, was key in discovering that Thieves were in fact visiting our Condo at night and opening the mailboxes with a Mail Carrier key.