Multiple storage devices

Jake1979

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In my set up, I have room for 2 m.2 drives. I have two 1TB m.2 drives that I'd like to use for recording. What's the best method to configure BI to use the full 2TB? Would I configure some cameras to write to one and some to the other? Should I Windows disk spanning to create one logical volume? I am not worried about redundancy.

A side note, what is the best sector size to format the drives? Does that size matter, depending on the drive?
 

fenderman

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In my set up, I have room for 2 m.2 drives. I have two 1TB m.2 drives that I'd like to use for recording. What's the best method to configure BI to use the full 2TB? Would I configure some cameras to write to one and some to the other? Should I Windows disk spanning to create one logical volume? I am not worried about redundancy.

A side note, what is the best sector size to format the drives? Does that size matter, depending on the drive?
split the cameras to various drives.
 

wittaj

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Yep split across so that you always have some coverage if one poops out.

Some will put backyard on one drive and front yard on the other. The problem with that is if a drive fails, you have nothing on that side.

So if you have 2 cameras on each side of the house, split it to put one camera of each side of the house on a different drive so that if a drive fails, you still have something on each side.
 

IAmATeaf

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What I do is keep drives as separate drives so no spamming or other software based disk management.

Then as @wittaj has pointed out logically split the drives across the drives, so I have exactly as described in the previous post so if one drive dies then I’ll still have one cam view at the front, side and back of the house.
 

mrc545

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If you don't care about resiliency, use Windows Storage Spaces and create a simple storage space with your two drives.

I don't believe the disk management spanning feature supports TRIM, but Storage Spaces does. You can also enable bitlocker on a storage space if you so choose, something else I don't think you can do with a dynamic disk.

If they are NVMe m.2's, the sector size doesn't really matter. I keep mine at the default. They are so fast that you won't notice any measurable difference in performance.
 
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Realize that surveillance HDDs usually support a certain number of streams. Like the WD Purple drives that are 6TB or greater support up to 64 single-stream HD cameras. I do not know if an m.2 NVMe drive can do the same. Obviously I do not have 64 cams writing to one drive, but I do have 7-9 per drive. I do not know if an m.2 can handle that much continuous, individual, concurrent writes 24/7, not to mention reads when you want to look at recording while the cameras are still recording.
 

Jake1979

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In my current system, I have a single generic Kingston 1TB m.2 drive that's been running straight for 2-3 years on 3 cameras. It would be interesting to see how many streams m.2 can handle, I imagine it's high though.
 

mrc545

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Realize that surveillance HDDs usually support a certain number of streams. Like the WD Purple drives that are 6TB or greater support up to 64 single-stream HD cameras. I do not know if an m.2 NVMe drive can do the same. Obviously I do not have 64 cams writing to one drive, but I do have 7-9 per drive. I do not know if an m.2 can handle that much continuous, individual, concurrent writes 24/7, not to mention reads when you want to look at recording while the cameras are still recording.
An NVMe drive blows away a spinner in every category except for write endurance (and capacity to $$$ ratio). Exponentially more IOPS, and near zero latency.

I had 40+ streams writing to a single NVMe drive and the disk queue length was something like 0.09. Basically a rounding error in terms of bottlenecking.

It also had no problem writing while I did a timeline view at 256x, and it was reading at multiple gigabytes per second.
 
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