Server Specs - Ram and Hard drives

tghd

n3wb
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I currently have a Dell T110 II with 4 GB of Ram, (2) 2 TB WD Red Hdds (no raid), and an Intel Xeon 1230 V2 (Ivy Bridge Xeon 4 core w/HT).

I am running 13 ACTi cameras on the NVR 3 software. Most are 3-5 MP. 80% record constantly during the day at a lower FPS (10 or lower) and higher FPS (15 FPS) when a motion event is triggered (which might happen on 6 cameras at once). At night they are all motion with few events triggered.

My questions are in regards to RAM and Hard drives since going from 8 to 13 cameras we have had a slow down in viewing past recordings (on clients or the server itself).

Is there a practical limit to the amount of ram for a NVR? I see that 4 GB is the general recommendation from many people, including ACTi, and it works great for recording but I am wondering about when we are viewing recordings. Will I see a boost in viewing ability by increasing my ram on the server to 16+ GB or even 40+ GB? I cannot install more ram on the current system, unfortunately, since the computer has Win 7 32 bit (thanks to some other software running that has to have it...) and we are in the market for a new CCTV server so we are looking at ram configurations.

Additionally, the harddrives. Does anyone have a problem viewing multiple cameras at once in a 13-24 camera environment with 7200 RPM Sata drives? Do any of you all use raid or SAS drives?

We are looking at a new CCTV server and have access to some last gen Dells for pretty cheap. Most are 2 x 2.67-3 ghz ghz older corei quad xeons with 24-48 GB of ddr3 ram and 2.5" SAS hdds. But we weren't sure if this we should focus on RAM or hard drives.
 

dr.

Young grasshopper
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You should be able to monitor RAM usage. 40+GB is insane.

For drives, you may be pushing the limit of the RED's. WD has Purple out but I think you would be better off just getting enterprise drives since you are planning on 24 cameras. RED's sould be better at archiving footage.

For playback, are you trying to view all 13 cameras at full resolution? That's a ridiculous amount of video information for just a CPU to handle. That's a a lot of info to transfer to clients too. Network is gigabit and configured properly?

This online tool doesn't even recommend xeons, dGPU's, or more than 4GB. I would listen to them:
http://www.acti.com/ProjectPlanner/


Does this help performance:
Remark: Disable 'Decode-I' function in Display Performance Settings
 
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