Looking to upgrade my SFF Dell

58chev

58chev

Pulling my weight
Aug 30, 2017
300
143
Etobi, Ontario
I will be adding a few more cameras to my BI system.
Looking to upgrade my SFF w/4Tb to a tower so I can add more drive space. 3 or 4 drives
I have been comfortable with saving up to 5 weeks of video. This has dropped to just under 4 with adding one camera, so far.

Question
Do I combine the drives IE: RAID 0 so say 3 x 4Tb = 12Tb?
 
DO not use a raid 0. One drive fails you loose all the data from all the cameras. Any type of raid is not good for surveillance video. Surveillance video is write intensive, other than raid 0 a raid doubles the about of disk write. Othe than Raid zero the recover is a PIA.

Set up three independent drives, have 1/3 of our cameras record to each drive. So if you lose a drive you will only loose the data for 1/3 of you cameras record data.
 
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@SouthernYankee
Thanks, I know RAID 0 has been talked about and fround upon, but just wasn't sure how to go about setting up JBOD's. (Just a Bunch Of Disks) :cool: ;)
 
Another option is to stick with your SFF and upgrade your storage drive. You can get single drives with up to 16TB capacity now. Seagate Exos 16TB Enterprise HDD SATA 6Gb/s 512e/4Kn 7200 RPM 256MB Cache 3.5" Internal Hard Drive ST16000NM001G - Newegg.com It's a single point of failure, I suppose, but if that's an acceptable risk, it might be your most cost-effective approach versus a new tower and new drives.

I have a couple of the EXOS in 10TB and 12TB, and would advise to set up a task in Windows Task Scheduler to run a Task as SYSTEM every night: defrag.exe /c /o /m (optimize all drives in parallel, traditional defrag for mechanical and a TRIM for SSDs). I'd been letting Windows handle defragging automatically on my big drives, which resulted in unrecoverable levels of fragmentation. A daily defrag keeps the fragmentation under control.
 
Thanks for the suggestion @mech but at almost $700 CAD that is not a cheap option.
Also, not sure if the DELL 7040 would support that large a drive??

I thought it was a nono to defrag an SSD drive?
 
Traditional defrag is counterproductive on SSDs, but Windows 8 and Windows 10 know how to do a TRIM on an SSD. The command I listed would defrag regular drives and TRIM an SSD.

If you see a cheaper path forward than upgrading the drive, by all means go for it. I suspect if you need X amount of drive capacity, adding another tower in addition to the drive itself is not going to be any cheaper, unless you score an unusually-good price on your new tower.

Thinking outside the box, do you really need 5 weeks of surveillance history? Maybe you have specific reasons for wanting to rewind time more than a month.
 
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