The Perfect BI setup needs SSD ?

adamdylan

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Hi there everyone

It has been suggested the perfect BI PC needs an SSD
However ?
BP2008's suggestion in another post makes sense to me.

__________________________
You don't need an SSD for the clips. Mechanical hard drives are a lot more cost-effective. Seagate SkyHawk or Western Digital Purple are designed specifically for surveillance video recording workloads.

You don't need an SSD for the OS either. SSDs mostly help with boot times and application start times, but that is inconsequential for an always-on Blue Iris server.

Blue Iris recommends putting its clip database on your fastest drive (e.g. SSD), but if I'm being honest I never notice a difference.

If you decide to put the OS + BI's clip database on an SSD anyway, 128GB will be more than large enough.

___________________-----

so will 1 purple hd do the trick?

Thanks
Adam
 

fenderman

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Hi there everyone

It has been suggested the perfect BI PC needs an SSD
However ?
BP2008's suggestion in another post makes sense to me.

__________________________
You don't need an SSD for the clips. Mechanical hard drives are a lot more cost-effective. Seagate SkyHawk or Western Digital Purple are designed specifically for surveillance video recording workloads.

You don't need an SSD for the OS either. SSDs mostly help with boot times and application start times, but that is inconsequential for an always-on Blue Iris server.

Blue Iris recommends putting its clip database on your fastest drive (e.g. SSD), but if I'm being honest I never notice a difference.

If you decide to put the OS + BI's clip database on an SSD anyway, 128GB will be more than large enough.

___________________-----

so will 1 purple hd do the trick?

Thanks
Adam
Do yourself a huge favor and spend a few dollars on an SSD, its makes a significant difference in the overall experience.
 

CCTVCam

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I remember when I changed my pc over to an SSD for the OS a number of years back. 1st thing I did was change my laptop over afterwards!! Phenomenal increase in performance. Also don't believe everything you read about SSD's. Both are mine are over 6yrs old and I use my PC for up to 18hrs a day 7 days a week. The wear indicators in the disc utilities for them show both to have very few bad sectors and lots of life left. I would never go back. Very little excuse not to SSD these days given the prices which are dirt cheap. Only thing I wouldn't do is have an SSD as your record drive as the constant overwrites will affect lifespan. Do as the Wiki suggests, SSD for OS and an traditional Hard Drive with endurance rating for recording. On the SSD, choose a good brand. There's not enough price difference to justify taking chances with some obscure brand to save a few bucks. Mine are Samsung and Sandisc respectively.
 

Whoaru99

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An adequate SSD is pretty cheap these days but I am of dissenting opinion that it's of much material benefit for a BI box in most cases.

Don't ge me wrong, I have a SSD as the OS drive in my BI PC, but only because it was there before made it a dedicated BI box.

Shouldn't need to be rebooting the BI PC or opening other programs on the dedicated box often enough for SSD to be a real time saver in that regard. Maybe if one reviews an assload of clips maybe there is time savings somewhere from database lookup or whatever but so far that ain't me.
 
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fenderman

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An adequate SSD is pretty cheap these days but I am of dissenting opinion that it's of much material benefit for a BI box in most cases.

Don't ge me wrong, I have a SSD as the OS drive in my BI PC, but only because it was there before made it a dedicated BI box.

Shouldn't need to be rebooting the BI PC or opening other programs on the dedicated box often enough for SSD to be a real time saver in that regard. Maybe if one reviews an assload of clips maybe there is time savings somewhere from database lookup or whatever but so far that ain't me.
There is a huge performance gain, even when just setting up the machine. Installing windows, updates, BI. Then there is the play back, there is a reason the DB is recommend on the SSD.
Considering that you can pick up a crappy ssd for 20 bux and a great one for 50 it makes no sense. Every pc regardless of use should be running the OS on an ssd, otherwise its like buying a corvette and driving it with winter tires in the summer. I can tell you with certainty from experience, that replacing the HDD with an ssd makes a considerable difference in performance in a blue iris system. It is foolish not to install one.
 

Whoaru99

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Oh, sure, installs go faster all that. No disagreement.

I just don't see those as as much value in the case of a BI machine due to the generally (at least we hope) infrequent nature of doing those things.
 

fenderman

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Oh, sure, installs go faster all that. No disagreement.

I just don't see those as as much value in the case of a BI machine due to the generally (at least we hope) infrequent nature of doing those things.
Im telling you, as someone who has 20+ machines that there is a huge usability gain. Its foolish not to use one. Try it. There are also ancillary benefits, making it easier to swap out larger drives or a failed drive.
 

Whoaru99

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That certainly explains things. Running that many machines shaving a couple seconds here, 30 seconds there, maybe some minutes in other situations adds up quite a bit over the course of time. For us one or two machine users, my perspective, is different.
 

fenderman

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That certainly explains things. Running that many machines, shaving 5 seconds here, 30 seconds there, maybe some minutes in other situations adds up quite a bit over the course of time. For us one or two machine users, my perspective, is different.
No, I dont mess with them on a daily basis. Even if you have one machine, not running an SSD is foolish. The difference is VERY noticeable, just like it is with any pc.
Look I am not trying to convince you, you can save 20 bux. My point is for the OP, not to make that same mistake.
 

IAmATeaf

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Every single machine in my house has an SSD, I work in IT so have quite a few and for me it’s not just the boot times but overall the machines just become snappier to use. So a firm recommendation from me too, yes people are right that you don’t really access the BI server like you would a normal user desktop or laptop but when you do the SSD will help.

Also it’s very easy for a machine to become disk bound especially when it is being put under load which BI does so again a SSD will help here.
 

CCTVCam

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Every single machine in my house has an SSD, I work in IT so have quite a few and for me it’s not just the boot times but overall the machines just become snappier to use. So a firm recommendation from me too, yes people are right that you don’t really access the BI server like you would a normal user desktop or laptop but when you do the SSD will help.

Also it’s very easy for a machine to become disk bound especially when it is being put under load which BI does so again a SSD will help here.
Yeah it's the fetch times that are faster. Anything that requires the BI program to react is going to react faster and reduce lag eg a zone trip analysis. You might think whats a few ms here and there. Well times are going to depend on machine load and depending on what's happening and the speed of travel of an object, it could mean a couple of vital frames get missed at the start. Also, SSD's don't have fragmentation issues. Furthermore, should the machine ever get into a state where it needs to buffer to a scratch disk, an SSD will massively reduce the slow down as it's more like buffering into memory than writing to a hard drive.

Financially, there's also no argument:

Cheapest SSD on Best Buy from a good brand (Sandisk):

$40.99 for 250GB SSD (more than enough for an OS and BI):

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/sandisk-240gb-internal-sata-solid-state-drive-plus/5394603.p?skuId=5394603


Cheapest Desk Top Hard Drive on Best Buy from a good brand (WD Blue):

$44.99 for 320GB Hard Drive:

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/wd-blue-320gb-internal-sata-hard-drive-for-laptops/5638733.p?skuId=5638733

So, it's $4.99 more expensive to buy the cheapest WD hard drive than the cheapest SSD (main brands). Yes the WD has 50% more storage, but it's extra storage capacity you don't need. Plus the Blue drives are hardly the fastest in WD's line up, pretty much the bottom really, and even if they were WD fastest, the Raptors which would cost you an arm and leg, they're going to be at least 10x slower than the cheaper SSD in input / output.
 

IAmATeaf

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Also don't forget that a mechanical disks in desktop/laptop is the slowest device in the entire chain and it's slower by quite a large factor and anything that can be done to reduce this factor will vastly improve the system.
 

Whoaru99

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Just for the record my point has never been one of $ in this regard. But, I stand by my previous comments in general.
 

fenderman

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Just for the record my point has never been one of $ in this regard. But, I stand by my previous comments in general.
You are welcome to stand by them but you are simply wrong. You havent even tested it. Try installing the OS on a 5400 rpm wd purple. See the difference.
Also note the title of this thread.
 

aristobrat

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so will 1 purple hd do the trick?
That's how I started. Everything was great at first, but after a month or so when I would go into the BI iOS app and hit the Alerts icon, it would do nothing for 30-45 seconds, then finally show me the list of all of my alerts.

When I moved the OS + apps to a cheap SSD drive, that delay went away (and overall system speed) greatly improved. I guess things would have been faster even if I moved the OS and apps to a spinning drive... I went with SSD for overall OS speed and because it's so tiny, which made it much easier to tuck into the case I'm using.
 

Whoaru99

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You are welcome to stand by them but you are simply wrong. You havent even tested it. Try installing the OS on a 5400 rpm wd purple. See the difference.
Also note the title of this thread.
Probably would not buy another WD Purple just to experiment with this because that's not the HDD I'd have used for the OS. I used a Purple for the video storage but for OS I would have reused, had there not already been SSD in the PC, one of the 160GB Seagate Barracuda (SATA II, 7200rpm) I have laying around. That's what I would use for a test if I did one.
 

CCTVCam

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If you want to experiment, just partition it. There's no issue in putting OS and data on the same drive. 99.9% of pc's have traditionally used one drive only. Unless you have recorded something you need to keep, there's no issue in wiping it and re-installing. Alternatively, use your Seagate drive. However, the one thing I will guarantee is no matter how good it may or may not run, it will run better from an SSD. That's a given.
 
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There's something quite fulfilling about getting to the Windows desktop in under 30s. Since I used my first SSD as just a game disk (loading games was faster), it wasn't until I put it as the OS disk that I was like "wow! where have you been all my life!" Dropped an SSD in an old gaming desktop my son plays on, i7-970, remarkable difference.

I'm not saying you couldn't use a slow arse disk for OS on Blue Iris, after all mine usually runs for a year before I reboot it (so obviously the boot speed benefit is really small), but it sure makes Blue Iris seem like a powerhouse as you can quickly scan through hundreds of clips without noticeable delay (including smooth previews of clips for example right in UI3). Currently the ONLY benefit traditional platter drives have is incredible capacity at a decent price, but for anything disk intensive you WILL notice -- it's night and day the difference even with just SATA SSD.
 

Whoaru99

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If you want to experiment, just partition it. There's no issue in putting OS and data on the same drive. 99.9% of pc's have traditionally used one drive only. Unless you have recorded something you need to keep, there's no issue in wiping it and re-installing. Alternatively, use your Seagate drive.
Yeah, the point would be to keep the two Purple drives as they are for recording the bulk footage (I record 24/7), but set up the Seagate HDD in place of the Samsung SSD. Win 10 isn't a problem but I see there are some limitations on the demo version of BI that might, but I'm not sure, skew the results. The results of such a test aren't important enough to me to merit another BI license.

However, the one thing I will guarantee is no matter how good it may or may not run, it will run better from an SSD. That's a given.
This is a point I've addressed a couple of times but it seems to get lost in all the noise. There is ZERO doubt a SSD performs better in pretty much all regards, except maybe lifespan, than a HDD. There has never been any dissention about this point in general. It's not about the cost, none of that.

The only bone of contention is how all that adds up or doesn't in the big picture. It's easy to cite 30 seconds savings on boot up or whatever, or a couple seconds on this task or that task, but if I only boot the computer or perform the tasks once in 6 months to me this is nothing. Clearly others see it differently and or use their BI systems differently.
 
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