URGENT: HDD pinging at 100% constantly. Help please!

[Corvus85]

Not that it matters, but your 2TB drive shows an actual capacity of 1.8TB - drives never give you the full rated capacity.

Yep, I'm aware of this.

FYI, one thing I did, as suggested by a user on Reddit, is the following:

'In device manager, find the disk drives and make sure that you have enabled "turn off windows write cache buffering flushing on the device".'

So far so good...

 

[jaydeel]

This solved my very annoying high disk activity problem…

[Solved] Blue Iris PC high disk activity when idle

TLDR: Make sure this task is not enabled in Task Scheduler - it may ignore your disk optimization settings: Task Scheduler > Task Scheduler Library > Microsoft > Windows > Defrag > "ScheduledDefrag" task ~~~~~ I've had this problem for awhile now and it has been driving me crazy. I believe I...

ipcamtalk.com

 

[Corvus85]

This solved my very annoying high disk activity problem…

I already did this weeks ago. I even deleted the task.

I woke up today and the disk is back to pinging at 100%.

Here's what resource monitor is showing:



What am I looking at here?
Deepstack is only at the top for a split second, but usually it's all the entries below it stuck at the top.

All my cameras together have a total substream bandwidth of under 1 MB/s.
Surely it's not too much to ask ANY HDD to be able to constantly write 1 MB/s without completely seizing the entire system.

 

[Corvus85]

Update: I ended the BI process AND service. No evidence of it running on my system at all.

.... Disk usage is still at 100%.

BUT

Resource monitor still shows the BVR files on the drive as being written to.


What's the explanation for this?

 

[wittaj]

Your BI Camera status page showed that your cameras were pulling 8,225 kBps which equals 65 Mbps which equals 8.225 MBps. I would assume that with motion and mainstream, that it will go up for those demands.

Just for kicks I just benchmarked my laptop with a 2.5" HDD at 10MBps (I do not use this for BI BTW). I doubt my drive can sustain 10MBps with 24/7 demands of the video going non-stop. It would be interesting for you to benchmark test or look up benchmarks for your drive.

Look at your response times - over 1,000 ms. 1 second doesn't sound like a lot, but my surveillance rated HDD is less than 1ms in most instances. Highest I am seeing is 12ms. That is a big difference. By comparison, my little 4th gen CPU is pulling 24,000 kBps or 3 times what you are doing on a much newer CPU...

 

[wittaj]

Could your BVR files still be writing due to cache of trying to keep up with the cameras?

 

[Corvus85]

When there's NO motion being detected, the disk usage is still 100%. This SHOULD NOT happen with a write demand of 1 MB/s.

This is NOT NORMAL, even for a 2.5" drive. Please stop trying to palm everything off to me not having the ideal hardware.

 

[wittaj]

Where are you getting 1MB/s? Your screenshot says otherwise....

Please list the make and model number of your drive and let's see what the true numbers and benchmarking of it is. Better yet, download a program and see what it can pull...

Well when YOU have tried EVERYTHING but getting a new drive....

Sometimes using less than ideal hardware does result in less than ideal outcomes....

At some point this is like going to an RV forum and complaining about trying to haul a big @$$ trailer with a honda civic when a real truck is needed...

 

[samplenhold]

What does the 'Storage' portion of the resourse monitor look like? See mine below

 

[wittaj]

So I downloaded the BI trial on my laptop and loading one camera at a time. After 3 cameras the thing was locking up. Obviously not the same specs as yours, but 3 cameras and the HDD couldn't keep up.

Maybe you just have a lower quality 2.5" HDD....

 

[Corvus85]

Please list the make and model number of your drive and let's see what the true numbers and benchmarking of it is. Better yet, download a program and see what it can pull...

What does the 'Storage' portion of the resourse monitor look like? See mine below

 

[Corvus85]

Maybe you just have a lower quality 2.5" HDD....

Then why is it only doing it 30 mins - 1 hour after reboot?

 

[Corvus85]

Sometimes using less than ideal hardware does result in less than ideal outcomes....

This is my sub bitrate for all my cameras.


Are you saying that a 2.5" HDD cannot write 1MB/s without pinging at 100% usage, even without any alerts happening??
You're saying this is normal and just down to 'bad hardware choice'?

 

[wittaj]

From your other thread, your BI Camera status page shows at the bottom that your cameras were pulling 8,225 kBps which equals 65 Mbps which equals 8.225 MBps.

Looking up your drive, I am seeing some sites showing random seek read/write of 10 MBps. So even though the drive is capable of short spurts of 100 or so based on what I am seeing, the 24/7 demands of camera feeds take a toll on a system.

All we all know is something isn't right in your system. You have tried everything short of replacing the drive.

 

[Corvus85]

your BI Camera status page shows at the bottom that your cameras were pulling 8,225 kBps which equals 65 Mbps which equals 8.225 MBps.

You know as well as I do that this bandwidth isn't being written to the drive - only in maybe 1% of the time, and even then, only a fraction of that because not all cameras will go into alert state simultaneously.

Is this true or not?

 

[Corvus85]

Look, I just rebooted, and there's MUCH higher throughput going to the drive, and yet it's reporting lower (ie. normal) disk usage. Compare this screenshot to my previous resource monitor screenshot above.


In other words, whatever is happening has NOTHING to do with the physical dimensions of the drive, and something is tripping it up 30 to 60 mins after reboot.

So can we please move on to an actual solution and stop with this (clearly obvious by now) fallacy that the drive can't handle ~1MB/s throughput?

 

[Corvus85]

To further drive the point home, here is 10x the throughput in my original screenshot, and disk usage is still at single digits.

o I downloaded the BI trial on my laptop and loading one camera at a time. After 3 cameras the thing was locking up.

Show me your resource monitor and disk usage graph and we'll see if it's exactly the same symptoms as mine.

 

[Corvus85]

And now back to 100%, despite lower throughput -_-



Are we in agreement now that it's not the physical dimensions of the drive, and that there's something triggering it - either software or hardware fault - that's causing the issue?

 

[samplenhold]

I have 22 cams writing to three WD 10 TB Purple HDDs split up eight to one, and seven to each of the other two. These 22 cams are writing continuous DVR Direct-to-disc no re-encoding. Some are recording dual streams, but not all.

When I watch the resource monitor, none of the disks ever get more than 11.6% Active time. Yours is showing 100%. Never does any of my disks get above 0.28 for the Disk Queue Length, but yours is showing 7.42.
My Totals in the BI status shows about 16450 kB/s and 576 MP/s, which is way more than you have.

Obviously something is slowly ramping up your disk activity until it maxes out. And since it goes back to normal once BI is stopped, it must be something in BI.

I wonder if it is one specific cam that is causing a problem. Maybe try disabling all but one cam and see if it still ramps up to 100%. If not, then cycle through each cam, or add in one cam at a time to see if the problem comes back at a certain load.

 

[IAmATeaf]

Also why are you trying to argue with the people that are trying to help, if you know better then go ahead and fix the issue!

None of us are affiliated or work for BI we are just a random bunch of people with a common CCTV interest who also happen to use BI.

Yes some of the suggestions may be random but that’s simply due to the fact that we are all from different walks of life and none here claim to be experts in Windows or BI.

In terms of suggestions, the previous is what I would do, go back to basics to determine if it is a particular cam or a number of cams that is the cause of the issue.