The Dreaded GAP. Very Frustrated New User

MrSurly

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I need to flesh this out for the record in case a search leads someone to this thread and all of its confusion.

This is a quick summary of my road to Blue Iris. My experience was fraught with peril, some of it chance (faulty drive) some of it my choice of the wrong machine selection...which I could have avoided by heeding the direct advice in the WiKi.

1. My system is now running flawlessly. I am out of town (actually overseas) and I am able to maintain a continuous OpenVPN connection and look at my twelve cams at any time, no crashes.
2. The majority of the problems that I experienced came from two separate causes:
A. a faulty brand new WD Purple 10TB drive that was NOT DOA, but intermittent.
B. My selecting a "TINY" format PC to try to run as a BI server.
3. The TINY PC, a "Lenovo M700 TINY" is a cute little PC but the TINY form factor (regardless of BRAND) means a machine that
a. supports only a low-power laptop chip (there's a "T" suffix, i5-6500T)
b. only has a single 2.5" hard drive bay (this is a huge issue)
c. includes no case fan
d. cannot accept PCIE cards (no dual NIC or graphics upgrades)
e. no replacable PSU (not upgradable)
f. minimal ports

4. Trying to use external USB3 hard drives proved a failure. I tried the Purple (the one that proved to be faulty otherwise) in a drive case, wired with either eSATA OR USB3 and it refused to stay running. This was eventually found to be the drive but at the time i wasn't sure.
5. I switched to using a 5TB EasyShare portable drive via USB. It seemed to be the answer UNTIL it had run for a day or so and I realized that the WRITE function was LAGGING...i mean it was visible on the timeline in BI, lagging as much as ten minutes or so as the blue 'saved-data' progress bar was freezing while the timeline was progressing and then, when there wereno motion events for a few minutes, the blue bar would slowly catch up to the current time. It was quite bizarre as it was still writing and not losing data....but it was maxing the RAM as a buffer and then writing from the buffer. In the more active portion of the day, it would lose chuncks of recordings due to "only" havng 32GB of RAM. In other words, the portable drive was too slow.... and this MAY have been made worse by the USB possibly outrunning the teensy power supply, but not sure, didn't test that.

5. After weeks of banging my head on the wall and with my trip date fast approaching I admitted that the TINY PC was a major problem area simply because its form factor forced me to use an external drive. Add to that fact, the other physical limitations previously mentioned. I searched for a different PC that was small but big enough to fit 3.5" drives and PCIe cards.
6. I found a deal on a Lenovo 510A-15i That is a small tower, current model i3-8th gen machine. (I was searching for a used OPTIPLEX or EliteDesk, the brand was chance not a precept)
The machine didn't include everything I needed, but importantly it could support what i needed to put in it.
a. it had an eighth generation intel DESKtop chip and will support an i7-9700
b. it can use an M.2 SSD
c. it can mount TWO 3.5" HDDs
d. the PSU is upgradable
e. I can add a PCI card and also a PCI express card.
f. it can hold 32GB RAM
7. First thing, I put my 10TB Purple in the machine, installed BI and it immediately started outperforming the previous machine.
this only lasted a short while until the bad drive became the issue again, but it proved right away that the other machine was itself a bottleneck.
8. with four days before my trip, I ordered
a. another Purple drive (8TB)
b. a 500GB M.2 SSD
c. 32GB RAM
d. PC express NIC card
e. UPSes for the PC/Modem/Router plus another for the switch in the closet and another for the switch out in the shop
f. Good GRIEF, Charlie Brown!

I set up the SSD for boot, put the new purple inside, fired up BI, did a bunch of settings stuff and lo and behold, it all works!

I left town a day later, fully expecting no connection from the field, but it is working super.
Thanks to all the information and assistance available on this site, from this group of folks!
 

Flintstone61

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Is your purple drive in the external enclosure connected via USB? FYI: This could possibly give you fits.
I was hoping somebody else caught that. I would find a away to get that hooked up to SATA before I did another thing. I've had at least 10 different USB drives in my life...most of them spin down at some point. Either the drive manufacturers firmware or the USB enclosure circuitry or both. when they get a call, they take time to spin up. WD MyBook was notorious. But if I swapped the WD Green for a WD black it stayed spinning longer in one particular instance.
 

MrSurly

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I was hoping somebody else caught that. I would find a away to get that hooked up to SATA before I did another thing. I've had at least 10 different USB drives in my life...most of them spin down at some point. Either the drive manufacturers firmware or the USB enclosure circuitry or both. when they get a call, they take time to spin up. WD MyBook was notorious. But if I swapped the WD Green for a WD black it stayed spinning longer in one particular instance.
I had it hooked up eSATA in the external case, then USB in the same case, then a replacement case, eventually, after moving it into the entirely different machine, direct mounted in the SATA bay I finally established that yes, it was the drive. The separate lagging issue with the portable USB drive was jut another illustration of the unsuitability of USB drives (of external drives) in this application. If I had a straight SATA extension cable that would have let me attach the drive directly but remotely It would have avoided the interface hardware in the external case but I didn't, so, untested. Again, the drive was proven bad anyway.
 
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