Everyone knows SSDs are faster than hard drives, but common wisdom says you shouldn't record security video to an SSD because:
Well I found a case where the performance of an SSD is of enormous benefit: Timeline seeking.
I have a secondary BI box in my house that records 19 cameras continuously with a cumulative bit rate of about 34 Mbps (4250 kB/s according to BI status). Most of these are sub streams with a very conservative bit rate, otherwise you could expect the total bit rate to be over 100 Mbps with this many cameras. Normally everything goes to a 12 TB hard drive (Seagate Skyhawk I think is what I got for it). But timeline seeking is very slow because the hard drive needs to seek all over the place to load video for all 19 cameras when you seek on the timeline. And it needs to do this while also continuing to record 19 data streams elsewhere on the disk! I found it could be 5-10 seconds or longer before all the clips in a timeline view could catch up with where I had seeked to.
So today I put in an enterprise-grade SSD from ebay and configured BI to record first to this SSD, then move clips to the HDD. This yielded an extremely huge improvement to responsiveness when seeking on the timeline. My timeline with 19 cameras now seeks nearly as fast as seeking a single clip! Gone are the 5-10 second loading times, now it can seek multiple times per second. I highly recommend this to anyone struggling with a slow timeline.
(enterprise ssds have significantly higher write endurance than consumer-grade SSDs; this is important for continuous recording boxes, not so much for motion-triggered recording)
- SSDs aren't nearly as cost-effective as a hard drive for the same capacity
- SSDs have limited write endurance, so they will wear out faster than a hard drive
- You don't need the speed of an SSD
Well I found a case where the performance of an SSD is of enormous benefit: Timeline seeking.
I have a secondary BI box in my house that records 19 cameras continuously with a cumulative bit rate of about 34 Mbps (4250 kB/s according to BI status). Most of these are sub streams with a very conservative bit rate, otherwise you could expect the total bit rate to be over 100 Mbps with this many cameras. Normally everything goes to a 12 TB hard drive (Seagate Skyhawk I think is what I got for it). But timeline seeking is very slow because the hard drive needs to seek all over the place to load video for all 19 cameras when you seek on the timeline. And it needs to do this while also continuing to record 19 data streams elsewhere on the disk! I found it could be 5-10 seconds or longer before all the clips in a timeline view could catch up with where I had seeked to.
So today I put in an enterprise-grade SSD from ebay and configured BI to record first to this SSD, then move clips to the HDD. This yielded an extremely huge improvement to responsiveness when seeking on the timeline. My timeline with 19 cameras now seeks nearly as fast as seeking a single clip! Gone are the 5-10 second loading times, now it can seek multiple times per second. I highly recommend this to anyone struggling with a slow timeline.
(enterprise ssds have significantly higher write endurance than consumer-grade SSDs; this is important for continuous recording boxes, not so much for motion-triggered recording)
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