New User - ?Laptop and external Thunderbolt connection to HDD

[ahole4sure]

I am a long term Synology Surveillance Station user. Would like to try a transistion during build out of our new location using BI

I realize it's might not be a super long term solution but would using higher end laptop i7, and connect to external storage with a thunderbolt port be acceptable for short or even medium term usage?
I will have 6 to 8 cameras connected with full time monitoring with hopefully higher quality clips for triggers.

 

[wittaj]

Most will say a laptop and external drives won't work long term, and some will say they work just fine.

Most will say a laptop is a poor choice because the processor is usually designed for temperature control or energy efficiency instead of performance.

And the tight confines of the laptop provided inadequate cooling for a 24/7 program.

Most will say external drives cannot keep up long-term of non-buffering video.

The theoretical transfer speed of USB 3.0 is 4.8 Gbit/s (600MBps) and when I tested it with 2 cameras for the live recording, it started stalling after 25min. It can't keep up with the sustained, non-buffering of video cameras.

Theoretical and real-world and sustained are totally different numbers.

It can even struggle with moving already recorded video over.

So here is a real-world demonstration. I was trying to move roughly 260GB of data from NEW to STORED.

I was moving it from a WD Purple (750 MBps) through a USB 3.0 (625MBps) port to another WD Purple HDD (750MBps)

At first it said it would take about 2 hours to move 260GB, but look how fast it dropped to a transfer of 37.7MB/s

Two hours came and went. About 6 hours later, the speed had dropped to less than 2 MB/s.

260 GB (260,000 MB) should have taken 416 seconds or less than 7 minutes at the theoretical speeds.

Those speeds just are not going to cut it for live recording of non buffering video.

Some say they work just fine, but I suspect they simply haven't had an incident happen yet where they found out they are missing recordings.

Of course YMMV.

 

[Photon Farmer]

connect to external storage with a thunderbolt port be acceptable for short or even medium term usage?
I will have 6 to 8 cameras connected with full time monitoring with hopefully higher quality clips for triggers.

Have used both thunderbolt and USB external hard drive enclosures to record more than the eight cameras you mention.
Only problem thunderbolt enclosure was front cover use to rattle, no issues recording video.

There has been thou, a vocal minority that keeps saying USB external drives cannot keep up long-term of non-buffering video.

For years I have used an USB 3.1 Gen2 external case with 5 IronWolf NAS 12TB drives.
Recording 16 cameras, no sub streams 24/7 to this RAID without problems.
I've had YEARS of SOLID PERFORMANCE.
We all like seeing data, I have no fancy graphics or disk testing programs, but I do have a stopwatch and I can drag to copy.

So I tried a couple real-world tests.

First test
I transferred a 7.61 Gig file from this Raid to a SSD, transfer time was 19 seconds, while still recording all 16 cameras.

Second test
Selected two folders 24 files each, totaling 48 files, with a combined 367.14 GB.
Stopped Recording all 16 cameras to RAID.
Dragged the two folders totaling 367.14 GB to a SSD.
Total time to completely copy all 367.14 GB was 17 minutes 12 seconds

So why are people having such different experiences?

I don't know!

Thoughts/guesses below are not answers - just things that might be possible.
Feel free to rule them out or add to the list.
1) USB 3.1 Gen2 controller chips inside different computers can have different performance, just like different model 4K cameras can have different night performance.
2) USB host port may have hub inside computer so several USB connection ports on back of computer will share one host port.
3) Thunderbolt has its own processor, USB uses the computers main processor so USB can be affected by CPU load.
4) Not all computer cables are created equal.

Some say just won't work, but I suspect they simply haven't yet found out their true performance bottleneck.