Quick question & critique on my BI folder arrangement

[Rob2020]

Hello everyone, I am trying to take my time to gain a good understanding of my new BI/cam setup, this forum has been very helpful in steering me towards quality and value, thank you.

Here is the system in question: BI software, 3 Dahua (Andy), C: OS/BI on NVMe 500GB, D: 500GB SSD, E: 4TB WD Purple, dedicated BI PC, 16 GB RAM, up to date CPU, WIN 10-64bit.

I just setup the following folder configuration;

C: Database Folder

D: New Folder

E: Stored Folder

I am still playing with the settings (amount of time to store, size of files, etc).

I thought the setup above mirrored the manual based upon what I read, then I noticed in the manual: It is common and reasonable to use a single storage folder scheme instead by configuring the New folder to delete rather than move to Stored.

Here are my questions; Should I just skip the D Drive? Is there a better configuration that what I setup?, are there pros and cons I am over looking?

Thank you for sharing your expertise.

 

[TonyR]

Having Windows 10, BI and BI's "db" folder on C: which is a SSD is great
IMO, "New" should go to a WD Purple because surveillance-rated drives are optimized for constant write, not so many reads.
You could make the 500GB for "Stored" becausse that's a normal (not constant) write so a regular HDD or SSD can handle.
In summary: C is SSD (OS, BI and BI "db"), D is WD Purple ('New") and E would be 500GB SSD ("Stored") if you put folders as you stated.

 

[samplenhold]

^ as stated, plus something to consider:

Why use 'Stored' at all? Moving the video files waste cpu cycles. Just put all of the video on the E drive/WD purple. Use the D drive/500GB SSD for video that you save out of BI and still shots. When I first started with BI, I did the write to E drive, after 7 days move to D drive and it was slowing the whole machine down.

My system is set up as so:

‘C’ Drive: Intel M.2 760p 2280 256GB PCI-E 3.0 x4 3D2 TLC - Has OS, BI exe and DB.
‘D’ Drive: WD Blue 500GB SSD NAND SATA III 6 Gb/s - Alert images, saved images and saved videos I spool out of BI for posting
‘E’ Drive: WD Purple WD101PURZ 10TB 7200RPM - 8 cams BVR files
‘F’ Drive: WD Purple WD101PURZ 10TB 7200RPM - 8 cams BVR files
‘G’ Drive: WD Purple WD101PURZ 10TB 7200RPM - 7 cams BRV files

 

[Rob2020]

Thank you both for the helpful input.

 

[sebastiantombs]

I use a slightly different technique. C being an M2 for the OS and BI. E is a WD purple for the New folder. I have no Stored folder at all. What I do is run an export and move what I really want to save/archive to another, large, platter drive on an as needed basis. Doing it that way lets me keep those videos in directories that identify what's actually on the video which makes it really easy to find them when needed.

 

[Rob2020]

One thing I should have been more clear about, my C: Drive is a M2 NVMe Drive. My D Drive is a SATA III SSD.

I might as well toss this out as some might find it useful. My CPU is a RYZEN 2700X (built before I decided to go down the BI route or it would have been Intel). Running a Dahua 2231 at 1920 X 1080 @ 20FPS, and a Dahua 5442 at 2688 x 1520 @ 15FPS; I am using about 10% CPU and 1 GB RAM. I only have 2 of my 3 cams up as I am still in test & configuration phase before I mount my cams. The 10% CPU is with both cams recording just so I am clear.

 

[sebastiantombs]

It's not a good idea to write video to an SSD because video is constantly writing and usually with multiple streams depending on how many cameras are involved. That can eat away the lifetime of an SSD which is based on write operations.

 

[SouthernYankee]

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 and read.
5) it is recommend to NOT store video on an SSD , multiple constant writes will kill an SSD.
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. The New folder must be on an internal drive.


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

 

[Rob2020]

Thanks to all for the added comments. For the time being, I took the D SSD Drive out of the configuration and I am recording "new" straight to the WD Purple as the E: "New Folder" with no Stored Folder configured.

I did notice my direct to disk had not been enabled and checking the box dropped my CPU usage from 10% to 6%.

I have a Nvidia card that supports encoding but it is not enabled at the moment as I read it is a power consumption tradeoff.

A New Question:

When I checked to make sure my new recordings were in the E Drive I only noticed two recordings. I did not see the substream recordings. On the view clip page, I saw all four recordings (2 cams & 4 recordings). The record substreams box is checked. I am sure I can figure this out by digging around but thought someone might know off the top of their head.

 

[SouthernYankee]

one recording per camera
The substream is recorded in the same file as the main primary stream.
Look at the Blue iris status page (lighting bolt graph,upper left) , cameras tab, The substreams will show up there.

 

[Rob2020]

one recording per camera
The substream is recorded in the same file as the main primary stream.

THANKS, I knew someone would have a fast answer.

 

[DalmatianPlantation]

Don't shy away from using SSD for video storage, even cheap consumer SSD are usually rated at 1dwd, so that means a 500GB SSD would be rated to last for warranty period or design life at 500GB written every day, I seriously doubt anyone is filling their SSD every day.
I use a WD M.2 nvme SSD with BI recording 8 cameras for a year, and the drive life indicator is still sitting at 99%. Using SSD for the "New" storage makes clip and alert searching and playback much more enjoyable.
I have another system that has 20 cameras and uses a 1TB SSD for all storage, it took a year to fill the drive, so it is basiclly running at 1/365th write endurance.

 

[SouthernYankee]

Continuous recording. A 500 GB SSD fills in less than 10 hours. It lasted a few month before it slowed down with retries and was dead.

 

[DalmatianPlantation]

The old saying your mileage my vary. So if you used an enterprise drive with a 3DWD rating, it would last for manurfacturer warranty life, don't expect junk drives to work for very long. I only need to do motion event recording, as I have decent BlueIris motion settings, and some cameras are externally triggered via camera's digital input, others are triggered by alarm system door openings, and PIR motion sensors.

 

[Flintstone61]

Is there any advantage to having "alerts" written to the original poster's config? where the SSD was drive D:\? or can you not seperate those from the "new" folder?

 

[samplenhold]

Is there any advantage to having "alerts" written to the original poster's config? where the SSD was drive D:\? or can you not seperate those from the "new" folder?

That is fine. That is how mine is set up. Alerts are just JPGs, not video files.

 

[DalmatianPlantation]

Hmmm, I see that my alerts folder is empty, guess I only use the alerts database when playing back video, as a single jpg would be useless to me.

 

[Flintstone61]

I have a couple of my camera's setup to take a 95% quality .jpgs every .3 sec when there is motion. Just to get a still of the vehicles in and out of the Condo parking area's. It works for me at this point.

 

[wittaj]

Alerts folder will be blank unless you tell it to take hi-res alert images.

But watch how much you allocate to that folder on BI because even though it doesn't show files, it keeps them stored for the timeline alert images and you can build up quite a large file of images that cannot be seen. My clips at the bottom of the BI screen had got over 200,000 because I had put a large GB total to the alerts folder (before I realized what this meant), so I set the alerts folder based on time so that it blows out anything that I wouldn't have video of anymore (because it is rewriting over).

 

[Flintstone61]

Alerts folder will be blank unless you tell it to take hi-res alert images.

But watch how much you allocate to that folder on BI because even though it doesn't show files, it keeps them stored for the timeline alert images and you can build up quite a large file of images that cannot be seen. My clips at the bottom of the BI screen had got over 200,000 because I had put a large GB total to the alerts folder (before I realized what this meant), so I set the alerts folder based on time so that it blows out anything that I wouldn't have video of anymore (because it is rewriting over).

Good to know Wittaj thx.... I appreciate the input...