System upgrade question

I

ingeborgdot

Pulling my weight
May 7, 2017
701
167
Scott City, KS
In the next several months I will be upgrading a guys system. It has 26 cameras at this time with several more maybe (just maybe) in the near future. Well, we need something with a little more beef and I have found some nice reasonable options. I just did a server with the Dell Precision 33450 SFF. I love the look,and the size. The only problem with the Precision 3450 SFF is that it will only hold 1 3.5 hdd. For his setup we really need at least a month of backup, and with all those cameras we have had to have 2 hdd. We have an Elitedesk 800 right now which gives us the interior room, but those are selling for almost more than double of the 3450 for some reason. I am looking for something in the i7 12th gen or newer just for power sake.
So, my question is would adding an hdd on the inside and then adding an external one over usb 3 work? Would the external be good enough? Just trying to put it all together. Thanks.
 
Does the computer have an optical disk drive that you could remove and use its connection for another HDD?

Most here will stay away from external drives, especially for live storage. If offloading older video it might be ok, but the 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.


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

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

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


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



1707679739436.png



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.

As always YMMV.
 
If you use an external USB drive, how do you plan on keeping it cool when it is being used constantly, some people have had some success using an external USB drive enclosures other not so much!

It will greatly depend on how much activity the cameras are seeing and if the external usb drive can sustain constant writing, if you plan on using a retail external USB drive it will probably fail due to overheating and constant use as they don't use drive rated for this type of use and the thermal cooling is not sufficient for steady use!
 
Yep, that's why this forum is so nice. Great minds giving good advice. It looks like I will either get an HP Elitedesk 800 SFF, or maybe even some type of real small tower. I will have to make it fit in a rack like the HP Elitedesk 800 I have in there now, but we'll find something.
 
wittaj said:
Does the computer have an optical disk drive that you could remove and use its connection for another HDD?
Click to expand...
Yes, it does have an optical disk drive. I would have to find the room to put another drive in though, that is more of the issue. I think the HP Elitedesk is just my easiest bet.
 
ingeborgdot said:
Yes, it does have an optical disk drive. I would have to find the room to put another drive in though, that is more of the issue. I think the HP Elitedesk is just my easiest bet.
Click to expand...

Yeah the HP Elitedesk is a great choice.

Keep in mind with the other computer, it isn't like you are carrying the computer around so you velcro or duct tape it inside if there is room or a SATA cable long enough to go out the box.
 
There have been others that use external drives for BI no problem There are postings on threads here, but I do not have them at my fingertips. I think there might be a difference using the case-mounted USB socket versus a PCI USB card.

I have thought of doing this but the reason I have not is that every enclosure I have seen that looked good, would not power up automatically after a power outage. They all seem to have a momentary switch that needs to be pushed to turn it back on.
 
See these threads

samplenhold

Post in thread 'External HDDs'

One problem I have found when trying to find an external HDD case, either USB or eSATA, is that the problem is none of them seem to be able to power up on their own after a power outage. They have to be turned on by the switch. Some of them need to be powered up prior to the PC being powered up for the PC to find and mount the external drives.

N

Thread 'Anyone used a USB 3.0 connected external Drive for Video storage?'

I purchased 2 x 4GB WD Purple drives for additional video storage. Turns out there are no more connections available in my PC to add them. (My setup has a small SSD and an 8TB Drive now but the 8TB is very close to full with just under 2 week's video history and I'd like to expand closer to holding 30 days.
So I am considering buying an external drive case which connects via USB 3.0.
I am using BI, so it appears I can set up cameras individually to move video to another drive after X days or X amount of space is used on the main drive.

Does anyone have experience with using this type...
 
I am one of those that use USB external drives with not problems. I have a 5 bay USB-C 3.1 Gen 2 enclosure (Oyen Mobius Pro 5C) with 3 WD Purple drives installed. I have had zero problems with it, including concurrently running BI with 20 cameras while copying ~5TB of video from one external disk to another external disk.
 
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Good to know. I'll have to look at all the options. I guess I could run an internal power and sata cable to a HDD that is outside of the case and install that HDD in some type of enclosure. I'll figure it out, but I'm not going to be doing this now I guess. I've decided to wait until Spring to start anything new.
 
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quest100 said:
Oyen Mobius Pro 5C
Click to expand...
This looks interesting. I really would like a few more HDs for my system but do not want to get a whole new case if I can help it.

I see it has a hard on/off switch. I suspect that if it loses power, it will power up just fine once the power comes back on?

Also, do you have it connected using a PCI card or just plugged into a USB port in the back of your PC? USB or Thunderbolt?

Are you using BI writing continuously to more than one drive at the same time in this enclosure?

My use case would be to continue to use the three WD Purple drives that I have in my BI PC as is, but add three more via this enclosure, dividing up my cams to write to all six drives at the same time. This would give me plenty of space for keeping the video a few weeks longer than I can now and to be able to add more cams.
 
Yes, it powers back on when power is restored.

It is connected through the built in USB-C 3.1 gen 2 port.

My system is recording 24/7 at around 170 Mbps. Three drives in enclosure, each running 4-6 MBps. Room to add two more.

No RAID - just a bunch of disks. Bought from bhphotovideo.com. Around $200?
 
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I just used a Elitedesk G6 machine, they are a little smaller than the older Elitedesks.
The new G6 is roughly 12"x13"x 6" in size. Nice machine.
I put two 10tb WD 7200 rpm purples inside along with a Samsung SSD.
It runs as quiet as a mouse.
 
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