SSD, nvme or mechanical?

Jake1979

Jake1979

Getting the hang of it
Nov 4, 2019
201
56
NH, USA
I'm building a small i5 NUC for my BI NVR and the OS will be installed on a spare NVME or SSD that I have but for the video storage, I can pick SSD or mechanical. For longevity, what is best? I'm leaning towards a 2.5 mechanical, probably a 2TB. Thoughts?

My goal with the NUC is to save on power.
 
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For longevity, skip the NUC. They are not designed for 24/7 operation for something like BI. It will get warm and the CPU will try to throttle and you will miss triggers.

There was someone here recently that tried a NUC with 2.5" drives and it was nothing but trouble.

Mechanical is better for the constant rewrites unless you get an enterprise rated SSD.
 
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Heat would be an issue in a cooler basement with 3-4 cameras running? Was hoping to go with a NUC for lower power costs. Right now I'm running BI on a Lenovo M710q (10MQS4H400) Intel i5 6500T with a couple of SSDs and it runs alright but I wanted to get something a little newer with Intel Quick Sync. If I won't see much benefit, then I could just add a mechanical to that unit.
 
I have a BUNCH of old desktops, none of which are that energy efficient- I'm going for a small power foot print. The NUC would be around 45 watts.
 
That person only had like 3 cameras and the NUC and 2.5" couldn't keep up.

Intel Quick Sync is not needed anymore with the substreams option.

Around the time DeepStack was introduced, many here had their system become unstable with hardware acceleration on (even if not using DeepStack). Some have also been fine.

This hits everyone at a different point. Some had their system go wonky immediately, some it was after a specific update, and some still don't have a problem, yet the trend is showing running hardware acceleration will result in a problem at some point.

However, with substreams being introduced, the CPU% needed to offload video to a GPU is more than the CPU% savings seen by offloading to a GPU. Especially after about 12 cameras, the CPU goes up by using a GPU and hardware acceleration.
 
With using substreams, when I click on full view in the web server, does it switch to the higher quality video stream?

I'm surprised that the NUC could not keep up, I've read a lot of good reviews on them for Proxmox running multiple VM's, etc.
 
Yes, when you switch to full view, then the mainstream kicks in.

I am sure some have had success with NUCs with BI, but NUCs are good for emails and light web browser, not CPU intensive VMS systems.

I don't recall though anyone here that said they were running a NUC successfully whenever someone asked. We see a lot of threads where people tried a NUC and it couldn't keep up.
 
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You would be surprised how efficient modern pc's are if you dont have a discreet video card. An intel i5-8500 that you can purchase for 200 bux or less will consume 30-50w under 25-50 percent load. I dont think you are far off from a nuc. A modern nuc will be able to keep up but you are limiting your storage space for not much energy savings if any.
Here is an example I did with an older 4th gen system using an efficient power supply (factory installed).

PC NVR Power Consumption Sample

I picked up an HP Elitesdesk i5-4590 small form factor machine for the office and ran some power consumption tests on it. This machine has an optional 80+ platinum certified power supply (there is a standard, gold, and platinum power supply option from HP). It rated 90/92/89% efficient...
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Either way, the ssd will have no problem with longevity because most modern 2tb ssd's are rated to write 1200TB. However, with a sff pc rather than a nuc you can add an 8tb purple drive for less than the cost of the 2tb ssd. The ssd for the OS, program files and database is a must though.
 
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I understand where everyone is coming from and appreciate your points. I've found in my research that the higher end NUCs run well.

As I mentioned, my current NVR is a Lenovo M710q (10MQS4H400) Intel i5 6500T , it's a mini, smaller than the NUC and run's with no issues. I suppose I could save the $ and just get a 5TB 2.5" mechanical drive to replace the 1TB SSD that is too small. I am planning on buying the 12th gen i7 NUC for a proxmox system. I'd be interested to know what models people were having issues with.

I do also have tons of old desktop computers from work. I have minis, mid towers, full towers, Xeon servers but my goals are 1) LOW power, the low end desktops are a bit more power hungry than the NUCs and 2) I need a tiny footprint.
 
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The 2.5" drives were as much of the problem as the NUC...


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If I decide to go with a Blue Iris system I will need a PC. Would one of the fanless mini PCs from Ali-Express work? How would I connect a 2TB hard drive? Can it connect through a USB port?
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URGENT: HDD pinging at 100% constantly. Help please!

Hey all, So this is another thing that I've been wrestling with for weeks, and each time I try something, I think I've fixed it, only for it to rear its ugly head several days later. Today I tried to access some clips, but realized that it wasn't able to load any. Upon RDPing into my BI...
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All interesting. For me, my NUC like system, which has been running for 2 years is working really well. I did just set up the substreams and the CPU did go down a bit. I have an older 1TB 2.5 mech drive that I'm going to set up and will see how it runs.
20220715_161723335_iOS.jpg
 
As I said earlier, I think, for now, I'm going to stick with my Lenovo M710Q, it's served me well so far with 3 cameras. It's running even better now with the substreams (thank you).

I do want to modify it though. I only have a 1TB M.2, OS is running 240GB SSD. I've built out another M710Q, this time with a 240GB M.2 with the OS installed. I want a larger video storage drive. From what you're saying, it's possible that the small mechanical drives would be an issue?

I do have a 1TB mechanical 2.5 drive that I could try.

Here are a few options that I could purchase:
WD Blue WD20SPZX 2TB 5400 RPM 128MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 2.5"
WD Ultrastar DC SN630 3.84TB PCIe Gen 3.1 x4 U.2 NVMe 2.5" Enterprise SSD (WUS3BA138C7P3E3)
 
FYI, the WD Purples are designed for video surveillance recordings.
 
Wonder why that is?
 
I'm sure that technically they are better, however I've been running these drives in minis for years with no issues. At this point, the cheaper drives will work until I upgrade to a 2U rack system.
 
NVMe drives have come a long way, endurance-wise. I have a 2TB NVMe drive with a 3600 TBW endurance rating. The warranty will expire before it hits the guaranteed TBW for me. New clips are written to the NVMe drive, then offloaded to spinners for retention purposes. As bp2008 mentioned in a previous thread, Timeline view with an SSD is game changing. My NVMe drive will read at 2 GB/s+ when quickly dragging through the timeline view, while writing the current recordings, with plenty of overhead to spare. Zero lag. Timeline view with a spinner was painful.
 
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