I'm trying an SSD as my storage drive on BI. I know it's advised against, so the forum in general has already told me it's a bad idea. This is one of those instances where I might end up learning from making a mistake. I replaced a 3TB WD purple drive with a 4TB Samsung 990PRO 2280 NVME SSD in an HP gen 3 Elite Desk SFF machine. (The hardest part by far was finding a hold down screw for the SSD. Thanks HP for using something microscopic and nonstandard. Perhaps the easiest source would be to part out a wristwatch 
)
My main hope was to reduce electricity consumption, which is a success only if you pay attention to the digits far to the right of the decimal point. According to kill-a-watt, the consumption has gone down from 0.55 kWh per day to 0.51 kWh per day. At my electric rate that saves 33.15 cents per year, and the SSD will pay for itself in 1,203 years. Seriously, I was expecting better by getting rid of a 24x7 spinning platter.
The unexpected good surprise is UI3 is significantly snappier. When scrolling full blast down the clips list, the thumbnails that often took 5 or so seconds to come up, now come up in less than a half second. When clicking on a clip, the start of play that often took a few seconds is now well under a second. The orange clock has so far gone into hiding.
As far as wearing out the SSD goes, with my setup it takes about 3 days to fill the storage drive. That's 122 over-writes per year, and I think that part of the SSD should outlive all of us. The big action will be in the allocation table. With my 19 cameras opening a new file every hour, that's 456 new files per day, and each one might well take more than a single write operation in the allocation table. I'm beginning to question why an SSD is ok for the C: drive when it holds the Alerts folder, but not ok for the storage drive. My Alerts folder has over 4,000 files in it, while the video storage drive has less than 1,000 files. Seems to me that the C: SSD is getting a lot more writes than the storage drive.
Even if the SSD works out with BI, I wouldn't project that onto a Dahua NVR that creates a new video storage file for every event. It's not totally apples-to-apples because of windows vs. linux file system, but I can't help assuming that the allocation tables get beat on a lot harder in the NVR vs. BI for video storage. Yet with BI creating a file for every event in the Alerts folder on the C: drive, it might be more apples-to-apples than it appears on the surface. I have a 10TB drive in the NVR so won't be trying an SSD in that one anytime soon.
Here's hoping that nobody gets the chance to say "I told you so"!
)My main hope was to reduce electricity consumption, which is a success only if you pay attention to the digits far to the right of the decimal point. According to kill-a-watt, the consumption has gone down from 0.55 kWh per day to 0.51 kWh per day. At my electric rate that saves 33.15 cents per year, and the SSD will pay for itself in 1,203 years. Seriously, I was expecting better by getting rid of a 24x7 spinning platter.
The unexpected good surprise is UI3 is significantly snappier. When scrolling full blast down the clips list, the thumbnails that often took 5 or so seconds to come up, now come up in less than a half second. When clicking on a clip, the start of play that often took a few seconds is now well under a second. The orange clock has so far gone into hiding.
As far as wearing out the SSD goes, with my setup it takes about 3 days to fill the storage drive. That's 122 over-writes per year, and I think that part of the SSD should outlive all of us. The big action will be in the allocation table. With my 19 cameras opening a new file every hour, that's 456 new files per day, and each one might well take more than a single write operation in the allocation table. I'm beginning to question why an SSD is ok for the C: drive when it holds the Alerts folder, but not ok for the storage drive. My Alerts folder has over 4,000 files in it, while the video storage drive has less than 1,000 files. Seems to me that the C: SSD is getting a lot more writes than the storage drive.
Even if the SSD works out with BI, I wouldn't project that onto a Dahua NVR that creates a new video storage file for every event. It's not totally apples-to-apples because of windows vs. linux file system, but I can't help assuming that the allocation tables get beat on a lot harder in the NVR vs. BI for video storage. Yet with BI creating a file for every event in the Alerts folder on the C: drive, it might be more apples-to-apples than it appears on the surface. I have a 10TB drive in the NVR so won't be trying an SSD in that one anytime soon.
Here's hoping that nobody gets the chance to say "I told you so"!
