Local Storage Best Practice

[SuperMiguel]

Hello All, im trying to plan my storage and wanted to check what are the best practices for blue iris. Here are a few facts about my installation:

• All cameras are 4PM
• Max 30 FPS
• Number of cameras will be a max of 15.

I currently have a UNRAID server with about 20TB of available storage that I want to use to store footage.
But im not sure how much I should use locally, how often should I copy video to the UNRAID server. My motherboard has a M.2 slot doesnt help at all getting an NVME drive vs a SATA SSD? How big should that drive be? Besides that drive (boot drive) should I get other drives?

 

[Mike A.]

Put the OS and BI on the NVMe. A little faster, not much more money, and will save physical storage space and connectors.

Beyond that I guess it depends mostly on what your storage and retention requirements are.

Given no other information, I'd probably size the local drive(s) to hold whatever your normal requirement is for time review (e.g., 2 weeks). Then use the 20TB as longer-term storage if you need to keep footage. Then you only have one stand-alone machine to worry about as far as your day-to-day. Back up to the server on say a weekly basis so that you have some time overlap between sources if there's a problem somewhere in the mix within the same time that you need to review footage. Or you could do more frequently if you have the need.

Alternately, you could try writing directly to the server, BI seemed to have some issues long ago when I was trying to use network storage as my primary so I gave up on that. May have changed since and/or maybe you could work it out.

I think I'd do the former myself just for simplicity/performance/reliability/less variables involved.

 

[SouthernYankee]

What is your CPU ?

I would add a single 4 TB drive internal. Record direct to the internal drive, then move to UNRAID server

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My Standard allocation post.

1) Do not use time (limit clip age)to determine when BI video files are moved or deleted, only use space. Using time wastes disk space.
2) If New and stored are on the same disk drive do not used stored, set the stored size to zero, set the new folder to delete, not move. All it does is waste CPU time and increase the number of disk writes. You can leave the stored folder on the drive just do not use it.
3) Never allocate over 90% of the total disk drive to BI.
4) if using continuous recording on the BI camera settings, record tab, set the combine and cut video to 1 hour or 3 GB. Really big files are difficult to transfer.
5) it is recommend to NOT store video on an SSD (the C: drive).
6) Do not run the disk defragmenter on the video storage disk drives.
7) Do not run virus scanners on BI folders
8) an alternate way to allocate space on multiple drives is to assign different cameras to different drives, so there is no file movement between new and stored.
9) Never use an External USB drive for the NEW folder. Never use a network drive for the NEW folder.

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.
Hint:
On the Blue iris status (lighting bolt graph) clip storage tab, if there is any red on the bars you have a allocation problem. If there is no Green, you have no free space, this is bad.
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[SuperMiguel]

What is your CPU ?

So the system has a Intel Xeon E3-1225 v5, 32GB of ram and a 500GB WD Black NVME M2 drive. (at one point it was a Dell T30 Server, that was moved to a 2U case)