New PC for BI - HDD size limit

[Dave Lonsdale]

I've finally decided to take BI off the "family" desktop PC and buy another desktop for my BI. But not being an expert, I've been pouring over PC specs to try and make the right choice. I spent hours looking at cheapish refurbished but now have capital expenditure approval from my wife to push the boat out a bit with something up to date that will survive for longer and as a bonus save energy over time. So I chose a new CPU from WIKI's list.

I zeroed in on the very popular HP 290 G3 i5-10500 at £500. For example:
HP 290 G3 SFF Core i5-10500 8GB 256GB SSD Windows 10 Pro Desktop PC - Laptops Direct
However, it appears that I would only be able to add a 2TB HDD - enough for 3 days. I need 6TB. Have I misunderstood the HDD size limit? Although undesirable, would I be able to add 4TB via USB or is there something like an addressing limit? I don't have the knowledge. DELL has a similar OptiPlex 5080 with the same processor but it's 50% more expensive and so far as I can make out also has a 2TB limit.

Assuming it is a problem, I've transferred by gaze to the brand new AMD Ryzen 5 Pro 4650G that has super duper chip technology at around about the same price. What do you expert guys think? For example:

Xenta MT Ryzen 5 PRO 8GB RAM 240GB SSD No OS Desktop PC

Buy our Xenta MT Ryzen 5 PRO 8GB RAM 240GB SSD No OS Desktop PC from our wide range of Desktop PCs

www.ebuyer.com

Just now I've no idea what the maximum HDD size is. Strangely it's often not specified. The offer I listed also raises another query - the price of Windows 10 Pro seems to vary between £20 and getting on for £200. Am I misunderstanding something?

 

[Flintstone61]

You can buy a 4 or 6 TB or higher hard disk. It should be formatted to GPT already and Windows will see it as such. Hard disks formatted in GPT have larger capacities in Windows than 2TB. MBR formatted harddisks have a 2TB partition limit in Windows. More people will chime in shortly I'm sure.

 

[SouthernYankee]

I recommend using at least a 120 GB SSD for the C drive, Just windows 10 and BI. The video drive can be 16 TB if using the stand 4K cluster size. If using a1024K cluster size it will support 4 PB. ( PB is 1024 TB)

From my allocation posts
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.

 

[MrSurly]

To second the above, get a machine that supports "M.2" cards and use an M.2 SSD as your "C" drive to boot Windows and run BI.
M.2 SSDs are cheap, super fast, and they are perfect for serving as your windows boot drive. By using the M.2 (instead of a spinning disk HDD) for your boot disk, the machine will boot super fast AND you'll free up the important 3.5" physical HDD bay(s) for surveillance duty HDDs. If you later decide to employ multiple drives or even very large multiple drives, to keep, say a month of video from a dozen cams, you'll need hard drive bays and SATA connections available.

 

[IAmATeaf]

How many cams and resolution are they? With substream support there is no longer a need for a beefy processor.

I’d still keep an eye on eBay for ex company stock. Things to consider, as others have said, SSD as the boot and BI drive, make sure the PCcan accommodate at least 1 full size hard drive, 2 would be better and my rule is a minimum of 12Gb of RAM, 8 is just a little too short.

 

[MrSurly]

As with so many other things, especially guy things there is a high likelihood that you will want to make it bigger/faster/stronger (more capable) later. It's a good idea to get a box with at LEAST two available drive bays. Keep in mind that it's a simple step to swap to an M.2 boot drive, if you buy a machine that currently boots from an HDD. As long as the motherboard supports the M.2, it really doesn't need to have one in place when you get it.
You can add RAM
You can add M.2 SDD
You can add huge storage drives
what you can't change ~easily~ is the architecture in place to support all the things, so look up the tech specs on any box looking for these things:

• Intel i-series processor, at least 8th generation
• how much RAM it will allow
• available PCI slots,
• M.2 slot
• # of SATA ports (on the motherboard)
• # of HDD bays EDIT to add: must be 3.5" size-----2.5" laptop drive bay is pretty much useless for this application
• # of USB 3 ports
• HDMI support

I may be at variance from the WiKi, not sure, but this is my wish list, having recently gone through getting what turned out to be the WRONG box to start and then starting over.

 

[MrSurly]

The HP linked above has a single 3.5" HDD bay. In the offered configuration there is a 2.5" SSD (laptop format) mounted in a caddy, occupying that 3.5" bay (based on the info that I have found and assume to be accurate; I haven't actually seen the machine). If using this machine, you would need to add an M.2 SSD card, install the OS on that and make it your boot disk. Simple to do and it frees up the 3.5" bay so that you can then install any 3.5" storage drive you wish, such as a WD Purple Surveillance drive with as many terabytes as you wish (suggest 10). The reason that you are seeing a 2TB limit is because thats the largest 2.5" SSD the vendor offers. They don't happen to offer the configuration you need with SSD card+storage HDD but it looks like the machine would support it, albeit with the limitation imposed by the "small form factor" meaning that you've already maxed out the box.

 

[Dave Lonsdale]

What absolutely brilliant feedback from all!!! Although already clear and obvious for some, for me it‘s now time to work all this feedback into my learning curve - I‘m a pensioner and can’t afford to screw up on what for me will be a big spend.

No one so far mentioned the new 7nm CMOS AMD CPU route. Does that mean it’s best to stick with Intel? So far I’m having trouble finding the latest i5 10500 in a bigger box etc (excluding the cost of a HDD) for circa £500. I’ll continue to work at it.

Oh, and are the very cheap Windows 10 Pro prices I see on the Internet something to be wary of? I have it in mind to use Windows Remote Desktop with my laptop instead of buying another screen.

Thanks again for the fabulous feedback. Fingers crossed you will head off a disaster.

 

[SouthernYankee]

a lot of the members on the forum are retired. Please read the wiki.

Choosing Hardware for Blue Iris

Buy refurbished. Don't build or buy new. The most cost-effective Blue Iris computers are refurbished business-class systems such as "HP EliteDesk" and "Dell OptiPlex". You can usually get a good deal by searching [URL='http://www.ebay.com/']Ebay[/URL] for specific CPU model numbers, and...

ipcamtalk.com

It is best to stick with intel as the CPU has a graphic processor built in.

I do not known about EBAY in the UK, or other used computer web sites. It is generally recommend to purchase a used Business computer (dell or HP) . I prefer a tower. Depending on the number of cameras and the resolution, MP/sec will determine the type of CPU. With the enhancements in BlueIris, the CPU is not currently the bottle neck in video processing as it use to be. I recommend a minimum cpu of an I7-6700.

Go used , there is no need to purchase a new computer with the latest CPU for BlueIris for home use.

You then can add the SSD (or M.2) and the correct disk drive.

 

[sebastiantombs]

Assuming you're going to run Blue Iris, while it's nice to "future proof" it sometimes gets more expensive than it may be worth. I'm a pensioner, too, and run a 15 camera system on an i7-6700 with CPU utilization under 10% due to substreams and hardware acceleration. My two cents, based on that, would be to look at nothing older than a generation 7, newer if you can find one at a good price. The addition of substreams to BI has made a quantum change in processor requirements, dropping them significantly, which will probably hold for a long, long, time.

Love to confuse things

 

[Dave Lonsdale]

You lot are causing me a real problem! (ha ha). I will definitely have very square eyes by the time I’ve finished. By the way, I got the idea of the i5 10500 from wiki’s “great performance” list.

I hope to upgrade over time but at the moment I have 13 Dahua cameras from 2013 onwards, including two of the now popular 5442, each running at 8Mbit/s. Yes, its the new substream feature that’s made this possible with my existing machine. But even with the apparent CPU load down at 20% or less, video playback is a bit jumpy using 10fps. Don’t know if this is just delay or skipping frames. Don’t know if it’s caused by CPU load spikes or LAN conjestion but I learned how to do the second NIC thing using a USB3 to ethernet adapter (all via one 100Mbit/s switch). So I have now split this into two camera LANs by adding another USB3 to ethernet adapter and switch. Still a bit jumpy but at least the cam from 2013 (SD3282D-GN) has stopped skipping up to 3 seconds with alert playback.

The sad thing is, now that I‘m old, I’ll no doubt forget what I learn from all your good advice...

 

[SouthernYankee]

What is your current CPU and hardware system. Do you use an SSD for the C drive, how much memory, do you use a separate disk for video ?
Is the lag occurring when you are on the BI PC console ?

a few screen shots from your current system would help. Use the window snip and sketch program.

1) windows task manager process tab sorted by memory (most at the top), Must contain, memory, disk, network, GPU, GPU engine columns
2) windows task manager performance, GPU (if you have multiple GPUs, then multiple screen shots).
3) Blue iris status (lighting bolt graph, upper left corner) clip storage tab
4) blue Iris status cameras tab

 

[MrSurly]

I can't prove this, but I strongly expect that you'd have better NIC performance with a dual-NIC PCI-card compared to using USB3 for networking. Also, as I recently found, doing playback with all the cameras on the screen is greatly improved when running two HDDs and having six or seven cams running on each drive versus a dozen on one HDD.

 

[Dave Lonsdale]

I guess that's another bay needed for a dual NIC card. I suppose it must be possible to choose different locations for individual camera stored files in the camera record tabs when using two HDDs but to date I've never needed to playback all cameras at the same time.

I've now learned about snip and sketch. What a handy tool! The family PC is a HP Pavilion 570 but my wife is desperate to "get all my stuff off it". This is mainly Blue Iris. Windows, BI and BI new files are on the SSD. Playback is still jumpy on the console. Happy clipping attached.

 

[sebastiantombs]

I'd get the New folder off of the SSD drive for starters. There is no advantage to using multiple directories and moving files from New to Stored. Just make the New directory a large as the drive will support and record everything there. Moving files costs CPU time and disk writes constantly.

Next, I'd cut the substream resolution on all cameras to the lowest available setting. Keep in mind the main stream, full resolution, is recorded, viewable in single camera mode and is used for playback. The substreams are used for console display and motion detection only, although in the newer versions of BI I believe they are also recorded.

Adding another stick of RAM, 8GB, would also help a lot.

Make sure your malware and virus scanners are not scanning the BI directories at all, anywhere.

 

[Flintstone61]

I'd get the New folder off of the SSD drive for starters. There is no advantage to using multiple directories and moving files from New to Stored. Just make the New directory a large as the drive will support and record everything there. Moving files costs CPU time and disk writes constantly.

Next, I'd cut the substream resolution on all cameras to the lowest available setting. Keep in mind the main stream, full resolution, is recorded, viewable in single camera mode and is used for playback. The substreams are used for console display and motion detection only, although in the newer versions of BI I believe they are also recorded.

Adding another stick of RAM, 8GB, would also help a lot.

Make sure you malware and virus scanners are not scanning the BI directories at all, anywhere.

How can one ascertain if Windows is scanning BI directories with Defender? Didn't seem like there was a specific switch to flip turn this beahvior off.

 

[sebastiantombs]

I don't use Defender but there should be a setting, somewhere, in it to not scan selected items/directories.

 

[SouthernYankee]

Defender

 

[SouthernYankee]

@Dave Lonsdale
Good screen shots. That system should handle your cameras.

You are strangling your system, you do not have enough free space on your C drive to support windows. Get the BI New folder off of the C drive

What are you using the AMD radeon gpu for ?

Why are there so many no signal? are your cameras wifi ? On wired cameras there should never be a "no signal" unless there is a power failure.

Are you continuously recording all your cameras or only recording on motion ?
Is the skipping on play back on the BI console ?

You have alot of software loaded that is not necessary for Bi running on a 8 GB memory, why is SQL server loaded ? Why Skype ?

A additional nic card will fit into almost any slot, it does not need another bay, i use a
TP-Link 10/100/1000Mbps Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express Network Card
I do not think you need an addition NIC at this time.

====================================
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.
======================================

 

[IAmATeaf]

I’d also get the iframe to match your fps, currently it’s showing as 0.50, you want it to be 1.00