Rackmount Blue Iris Upgrade

[IReallyLikePizza2]

I'm just going to post random stuff here about my Blue Iris upgrade that I'll be doing soon

Currently running

i5-9400 (6 Cores/6 Threads)
Gigabyte B360M-DS3H
16GB RAM
1u Supermicro SYS-5017C-M with single 350w 80+ Gold PSU
2 x 800GB Intel DC S3610 SSD for OS, DB and New Clips
4 x 4TB HDD In StableBit Drivepool for bulk clip storage
Intel Quad Port Pro/1000 NIC
Windows Server 2019

The issue with this setup is that the CPU cooler has to be 1u high, which is very small. And I can't upgrade to a higher wattage CPU. I would if I was using a real server board, but on regular consumer boards the RAM blocks airflow, so you can't use a beefy passive heatsink. I also have the two 2.5" SSD's just kind of thrown in there, because there is no more bays. In this picture you can see what I mean



I'm also using Stablebit Drivepool to make the 4 x 4TB drives into a single 16TB pool with no redundancy (Because I really don't care THAT MUCH about old clips). But if a drive starts to fail now, I need to get the data off onto a new drive, having only 4 drive bays total means I then need to add a USB drive to the pool to remove the old disk, which kinda sucks

So so solve all these problems, I bought a 2u Rackmount case which has 8 hotswap bays, 2 internal bays and just a whole lot more space. I'll toss the board, and put all my components in there along with a much beefier CPU fan










This will be the new specs, bold is new. Costs in brackets

($0 + $20 for Cooler) i7-8700K (6 Cores/12 Threads) with bigger CPU cooler
Gigabyte B360M-DS3H
16GB RAM
($200 shipped) 2u Supermicro SuperChassis 825TQ-R740LPB with 2 x 740w 80+ Platinum PSU's
2 x 800GB Intel DC S3610 SSD for OS, DB and New Clips
4 x 4TB HDD In StableBit Drivepool for bulk clip storage
Intel Quad Port Pro/1000 NIC
($40) LSI 9207-8i HBA flashed to IT mode to handle the 8 x Hotswap bays
Windows Server 2019

Very excited to get this upgrade on the way. The CPU is from my wifes old PC, so I'm stealing that and putting the 9400 in there, which will then become a media center PC. Thermals will be much better, and it gives me a lot more room to expand. I can possibly get some extra money from selling the motherboard, but I'll probably just give it away

 

[sdkid]

that is cool--- and I hope it lasts a long time for you. I put a rack in last summer and thought it would be cool to do something like this.

There have been several threads about this kind of thing-- and economically, it's tough to justify spending that much money when so many good used PC's can be purchased on eBay for cheap-- though it's hard to calculate the value of the used components you are re-purposing. That combined with the extra power something like this would use 24/7 has kept me looking at simple Dell's or HP's that sip power and still have the space for a good drive or two.

I hope your machine works great for you!! Cool project!

 

[SouthernYankee]

KISS - keep it simple & stupid
The more software you run the more compatibility issues you will have. I strongly recommend NOT using a raid, disk mirroring or drive pool software. Test it out run about 5 days , then pull out a drive, format it and put it back see if the system recovers and how long it takes. I used the BIOS raid 1 on my AMD original BI PC, forced a failure and put in a reformatted drive, the system was still recording the cameras. It took over 3 days to recover, because the disk that was recovering was still be written too continuously.

Will your data survive if you hit the computer with a 16 LB sludge hammer, Or empty a 357 into it ? If not then you need to rethink your data recovery.

I recommend that you use a simple windows file system for 3 of your drives, then distribute you cameras on to different drives, if you have 3 front door cameras, then each camera goes on a different drive. Balance the load on each drive so the files age off at about the same time. For data back use a simple NAS. I have a Single drive NAS in a fire proof gun cabinet. I back up some of my cameras (not all) to the NAS drive, older video files do not need to be backed up, only the most current, today and yesterday. I backup the cameras by using the BI CLONE feature to write to the NAS. The CLONE cameras in BI are hidden, with no motion processing, and not decode unless required.

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.

 

[IReallyLikePizza2]

I've been running Stablebit Drivepool for probably 7 or 8 years now I think, since it first came out. Its extremely simple, its just regular NTFS or ReFS disks but pooled into one volume. You can browse the files on each individual disk still if you want to, so the software is not needed at all to get the data. You can also set all sorts of file placement rules so if you want to use 1 drive for one folder and another for a different, you can. The benefit is you get ALL the space of all 4 drives without needing to balance anything yourself

There is no real recovery here, if a drive fails completely, all the data on that specific drive is gone, but you keep the rest. It does integrate with Stablebit scanner, so it can automatically evacuate the data off of drives with SMART failures or bad sectors

The best part is you can also integrate it with StableBit CloudDrive, and offload data to the cloud. Pretty good system all round for Blue iris

Never, ever use the software RAID built into consumer motherboards, unless you want a horrible time

 

[sebastiantombs]

What kind of CPU load does StableBit add?

 

[concord]

I have a chasis like that at work in a server room, but it's a 16 drive version. Plenty noisy, good thing it's in the server room . Been thinking of swapping out the motherboard, as it is really old, with something newer and make it a VM server. Good luck wiith the build.

 

[IReallyLikePizza2]

CPU Usage is pretty much nothing, the only time it's really doing anything is when its balancing out the pool, which it only does if things get out of whack. Well worth the small cost to not deal with having to organize folders

These fans are very loud on full speed, I'll have them turned WAYYYY down

 

[IReallyLikePizza2]

Finally made the change, everything "just works" which is nice, and now I am seeing CPU Usage at 15%! Amazed how much better the 8700K is than the 9400. Thermals are better, and now I have 4 extra drive bays

The cable managment could be better, but this case really wasn't designed for a standard MATX board, so it will never be perfect. I also wanted to get Blue Iris back up and running!













2 SSD's in these non hotswap bays, since they will probably never fail

 

[IReallyLikePizza2]

New PSU's just came in too, SuperMicro PWS-501P-1R which are 500w 80 Plus Platinum

Power will come from 2 different UPS's which are on 2 different circuits

 

[IReallyLikePizza2]

Storage latency on the disks has been cut in half now they are on the LSI HBA, even on the SSD's connected to the board are better. Whatever SATA controller that board is using, I don't think it was up to the task of handling all 6 drives

 

[IReallyLikePizza2]

Something interesting here I've never really noticed (Or needed to notice, anyway). Even while maxing out the utilization on all drives at the same time as Blue Iris writing to them, the CPU usage is sitting right now at 8%. Before, the CPU usage would rise when doing something like this, I suppose the on board SATA controller uses CPU cycles, and now its offloaded to an HBA, its not using CPU. Not an expert, just my guess

 

[IReallyLikePizza2]

Figured I'd post this here incase anyone is interested in the software, I've found that one of these disks might be bad, despite SMART being all good

The decryption is still on 48% of the 4TB-2 disk, the others finished forever ago. Even though its on 100% usage, its sitting at super low performance numbers



The nice thing about using Stablebit Drivepool is that I can just hit "remove" and it will automatically move all the files to other disks and let me know when its ready to pull out. I threw a spare 1TB disk into the pool to take up some slack of the space that will be lost. I have an 8TB drive coming from another system soon I'll just throw in here

 

[Flintstone61]

what in the high oh hell is HBA

 

[IReallyLikePizza2]

Host Bus Adapter, They are enterprise SAS/SATA controllers