Is there a way to add more storage folders in BI?

ARAMP1

ARAMP1

Pulling my weight
Feb 13, 2018
250
173
Memphis, TN
I have a few WD Purple drives in my system. I had each camera recording continuously to one each drive. Basically, one drive has one folder where clips are stored. (Clips and Archiving -> Aux 1 file assigned to hard drive M. Clips and Archiving -> Aux 2 file assigned to hard drive N. Etc).

As I added cameras to my system, I've had to record a couple cameras to each drive now. 8MP cameras recording continuously to 4TB drives fills them up quick. I have one more Aux file I’m not using, and I’m not using New and Storage files, so I do have a bit of expandability. Other than just buy bigger drives (which I will from here on out), is there a way to set up drives differently than what I’m doing now? Or, add more Aux files for more storage locations?
 
Well, I went ahead and changed the names of each folder and assigned each folder to a drive. This gives me 10 folders (one for each drive) for storage.

Folders 1.jpg

For some reason, my cameras don't see my L drive/storage folder.

Folders 2.jpg
 
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L which I think is Alerts is treated differently and can’t be used to save clips to. If you search under my username you’ll see that I tried to do something similar ages ago.

You can sort of frig it in Windows and mount a drive under a folder so for example on say the S: drive you could create folders called Drive1 and Drive2 then within Disk Management rather the assign a drive letter you can mount 2 drives each under one of the folders.

Having typed all of this I’m not too sure how or if the management of disk space would work and how BI would cope so you could test to see what happens?
 
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@ARAMP1 ,
FWIW, there's lots of do's and don'ts info in 'Clip Folders' of BI's Help file, page 81. ;)
 
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@ARAMP1 you are using the recommended approach of dividing your camera load onto your various drives. You are probably just at the extreme end of the scale (after all that’s quite a few smaller drives I presume).

It’s not for everyone,but I’ve been using DrivePool for over a year without issues. Might be an option if you keep adding drives.

Otherwise, you’re on the right track getting larger drives.
 
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IAmATeaf said:
Found my post


Second drive not showing in drop down for camera?

Second drive not showing in drop down for camera?

I’ve been messing around with BI and have noticed that my 2nd drive doesn’t appear in the drop down. Can anybody point me to what I am doing wrong or what I need to correct/update please ?
ipcamtalk.com ipcamtalk.com
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I missed this in my search. Thanks. Basically the same thing just a year ago.

TonyR said:
@ARAMP1 ,
FWIW, there's lots of do's and don'ts info in 'Clip Folders' of BI's Help file, page 81. ;)
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Honestly, I had forgotten about the help file. Thanks.

crw030 said:
@ARAMP1 you are using the recommended approach of dividing your camera load onto your various drives. You are probably just at the extreme me end of the scale (after all that’s quite a few smaller drives I presume).

It’s not for everyone,but I’ve been using DrivePool for over a year without issues. Might be an option if you keep adding drives.

Otherwise, you’re on the right track getting larger drives.
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I've used it before in windows without any issues. I may just try it again for BI.

When I started my setup in BI4 with just a couple 4MP cameras, the single 4TB WD Purple worked well. I wanted a little more space so I got another one. I ditched the 4MP Costco specials for 8MP Hikvisions and bought another one. Added a couple more cameras and bought another one. Next thing I know, I have almost 20 cameras and no corner of my property that isn't covered and a bunch of 4TB drives that I wish were at least 8TB or 10TB.
 
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Yeah makes sense, I have a couple 2GB drives from a NAS I had thought of using (because they are just idle atm), 3-4TB drives that I’ve been using past 2 years, and adding 3-12TB drives this year.

But if I had kept adding 4TB along the way, just like you I would have faced problems (probably first with SATA ports and having to add a card to add capacity) then power supply. Don’t forget all those smaller drives consume power so a few larger drives would ultimately be more efficient if you can swing them down the road.

I will be shucking 3 WD Elements 12TB external drives this month to add capacity. I think they were on sale for $189 which I believe is a halfway decent price for 12TB WD (white label) RED drives that aren’t SMR.

Good Luck!!
 
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crw030 said:
I will be shucking 3 WD Elements 12TB external drives this month to add capacity. I think they were on sale for $189 which I believe is a halfway decent price for 12TB WD (white label) RED drives that aren’t SMR.
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That is what I did( "Best Buy Sale") I got the same 3-12TB drives and Shucked them......
 
IAmATeaf said:
With drivepool can you still access data if one of the drives in the pool dies?
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Slight disclaimer but I haven’t had a drive fail yet. But according to their materials if a drive starts indicating it is failing (SMART) then all files get evacuated from the drive and the pool stops using the drive. If the drive fails abruptly, without warning just the data on that drive is lost. All files on all drives are saved as regular NTFS accessible files you can retrieve by just connecting to any other computer.

It’s not like RAID or ZFS Pools where one drive takes out the pool. But it also doesn’t offer the same level of protection, with Parity disks and hot spares and such. It does have a duplicate “critical folders” where it will create copies of important directories, might make sense for something important like family pics. But I figured for video files being recorded, if I lost a drive I Can tolerate losing some stored video files but just keep on going anyway as most footage isn’t super important if it were to get lost.

As soon as my new motherboard arrives I’ll write up how easy/difficult it was to move the pool from one computer to another, and to add 3x12TB drives to an existing 3x4TB array.

For most people it’s not even a consideration, but thought I would mention it because the OP has already grown beyond the limited number of storage folders provided by Blue Iris. It’s an easy way to handle the edge case imho.

StableBit - The home of StableBit CloudDrive, StableBit DrivePool and the StableBit Scanner
 
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I use Windows built in storage pool features. I have 4 8tb drives as one pool. One 1tb drive as the storage pool for selects cameras with temporary storage. And a small ssd.
no issues over here with any of these
 
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